Alien Group's Voice Box

[Bill Lange]

Does anyone have any info on this product? It would be interesting to emulate this product on the Atari800WinPlus emulator. Does anyone have manual scans or rom dumps of this?

 

WRL

[Nukey Shay]

http://www.robotprojects.com/voice/voice.htm

 

A page that contians pics and docs of various boards...including AG for the Atari. You might get an idea what was used from those. IIRC Popular Science or Popular Electronics ran an article back in the mid-'80's that detailed how to convert the Speak'N'Spell hardware into a true voice synthesiser. To minimise cost, it was done with a Timex1000...but I imagine that the same method could be used for the Atari 8-bit. Disk images of the S.A.M. software-only synth exist, though.

[Bill Lange]

Thanks for the info. I actually have an original SAM disk. The problem with SAM is that it blanks the screen while producing voice. With the AG VB, you just send the data to the device and forget about it. I'll check out the link.

 

WRL

[Nukey Shay]

What I'd like to see implemented in the emulator is cassette support (preferably through MP3's). Using that method would give you true speech samples without blanking the screen. That would be cool to implement actual arcade game samples into the ported games.

[Bill Lange]

I can't believe that the Alien Group sanded the numbers off the ICs that they used in there products. Good info on that page though.

 

The Atari800WinPlus 3.0 and higher has cassette support. I don't know if it is just the software tract or if it also supports the voice track. Some Atari cassette games had voiced instructions as you loaded the game. Of course programs like Spanish, German ... also used voice from cassette. I've only been able to find cassette images of games w/o voice.

 

WRL