Votrax SC-01

Is there any chance that someone on this list has an extra Votrax SC-01
speech synthesis chip for sale?

I know it's not vector related, but we are definately the type of guys
to have such items laying around if anyone would. I thought I'd ask. I
do know that Gorf, WoW, and QBert use this chip, but I don't own any of
these boardsets. I'd rather not canibalize one either, but I will go
that route if I have to I suppose.

I'm repairing my Heath Hero Jr. robot. I got this almost one year ago,
non-working, and it has been frustrating me for a long while. The robot
is almost completely inoperative, except for some bus activity. Last
weekend, I picked up the project again and with the help of a better
scope, I noticed that a stable bit pattern was being put onto the bus.
I borrowed a logic analyzer and stuck that on the data bus and captured
what was going on. I confirmed that the CPU was executing a tight loop,
on the order of 20 instructions. I disassembled the code into potential
fragments, and I compared these to a version of disassembled but
somewhat commented code for the entire monitor rom program. I managed
to do some pattern matching, and zeroed in on the code segment that was
being executed, and learned that this piece of code was trying to talk
to the speech synthesizer. Specifically, it was looping forever,
waiting for the "phoneme complete" line to strobe. That strobe was not
coming. I removed the chip, and hooked up a clock to that line instead
in order to fake out the CPU. And it worked! Having a signal there was
all the robot needed to get out of the loop so it could continue doing
its initialization routine. It was cool. My wife was not so excited
when I woke her up at 12:30am last night to tell her of my progress.
But, as loving as she is, she was happy for me at least. ;-)

Anyway, the problem is that the speech is a huge part of the output of
this guy, and it's just not the same without speech. It's almost
unusable, because all the requests for data are given verbally.
Obviously, I'd like to fix it so that the whole thing works like it
should.

If anyone has one of these chips available, I'd be most appreciative!

And, as soon as I finish up this project, then I can program the robot
to guard the vector arcade. I can program it to guard a room and set
off an alarm if the intruder doesn't enter the right password into its
keypad. HEHEHEHE. Actually, then I can get back to my backlog of
projects, including fixing a few more Amplifones and building those
LV2000's .. You guys on the west coast are lucky. I still haven't
received mine yet. At least El Nino has brought us a mild winter with
almost no snow...

Thanks,
Joel-
Received on Thu Mar 5 09:31:16 1998