SpiceWare's Blog

To my ears the word "escape" doesn't sound right at all.

I attached the source for "escape". For the actual game I'll try to digitize the AtariVox output, but based on the tests with the Berzerk samples those might be hard to understand. If so, I'll stick with the Alex voice.

The "s" and "p" sounds have high-frequency components that can't properly be represented at these low playback rates. Perhaps special manipulation of this particular sample may fix that (such as not filtering the short spurts where these sounds occur in the sample.) You might need to download Audacity or another GUI sound editor for this.

Wow! great job! That all sound nice and clear. The slower, deeper voice got a good heavy robot feel to it and sound best to me.

I'm not going to worry about it - after all, it's a robot, they're supposed to sound a little off.

All of it sounded a little "mushy" to my ears. The last "intruder alert" at the slower speed sounded better. It would sound clearer to me if the individual syllables were more defined.

the syllables can be more defined by using 8000Hz samples and a 4K playback buffer, but then there would be no ROM or RAM left for the game.

That said, I did create the samples by using the fastest talking speed of Alex so that the samples for each word would fit into the 2K playback buffer. Decreasing the base speed may be an option. A small random value is added to/subtracted from the base speed to get the variable pitches, like those that are heard in the arcade game.