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AtariVox Speech Synthesizer, by Richard Hutchinson
5/5
When the Atari reigned supreme, there was something other systems had that it didn't - voice synthesis in the form of The Voice for the Odyssey 2 and Intellivoice for Intellivision. With digitized sound, kids today can't imagine what it was like when arcade games first added speech, and to have that ability at home was ubercool. After these many years, Richard Hutchinson rectified this in the form of the AtariVox.
The AtariVox utilizes a SpeakJet, which is a single chip solution for adding voice and sound synthesis. It also contains 32K of non-volatile memory that can be used to save and recall data. In order for the AtariVox to work, it must be plugged into the right joystick port, which effectively limits its use to 1 player games. It also needs to have speakers plugged into it, I'm using a pair of Sony SRS-P3 speakers I had laying around. I have a stereo modified Atari, so one of these days I need to get around to building Nathan's sound mixer:
http://www.cheeptech.com/atarivox.html
The AtariVox announces itself when you first turn on your Atari. That's handy as it lets you know the AtariVox is set up correctly. Beyond that it will sit there inert until accessed by a game that knows how to use it. Games that currently support the AtariVox are AStar, Elevators Amiss, Fall Down, Go Fish! and Strat-O-Gems Deluxe. Currently I have three of them, Elevators Amiss, Fall Down and Strat-O-Gems Deluxe. I've also used it with the unfinished homebrew Man Goes Down by utilizing my Krokodile Cartridge. While the games work fine without an AtariVox, they are all enhanced with it.
Elevators Amiss only uses it to save the high score for each of the 4 difficulty levels. Fall Down uses it to announce the name of the game when the Atari is turned on, save high scores and announce the winner of each round. Strato-O-Gems Deluxe uses it most effectively - saving the PAL/NTSC setting and high scores, announcing the name of the game, counting up the combinations made and saving data for instant-replays (I think that's a first in a VCS game). It even saves the best play sequence for the attract mode! Man Goes Down makes great use of it as well, saving high scores, starting off the round with "Run Run Run" or other phrases, announcing various items that you acquire, additional sound effects such as R2D2 like noises to follow the phrase "The fruit is with you!" and even berating you with "You Suck" for an extremely low score. Even though it's not completed, it's a really cool game. I hope Alex Herbert is able to someday finish it.
I had the original style AtariVox, with everything exposed on an open circuit board and needing a joystick extension cord to plug it in. Richard was kind enough to send me the updated board w/case, all I had to do was swap the SpeakJet and memory over to it. The extension cord is no longer used (it's now connecting my C=128's 80 column output to a 1084). He also sent me a serial interface adapter and I plan to resume writing a Mac OS X program to talk to it once the Cannonfire hack is done.
Next up, Reindeer Rescue
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