putting voice in basic games

[Kernal]

is there an easy way to put voice samples in a basic game?

 

Does any one have a routine written for this

also what format would it have to be in?

 

RAW or is there a way to put mod's in a basic program (with appropriate runtime player of course)

 

any help would be great.

[Rybags]

There's S.A.M. (Software Activated Mouth). It should be available for download somewhere.

 

It uses a fair bit of RAM though, not sure on the exact amount but I'd imagine at least 6-8K.

 

The alternative would be to have samples of short bits of speech and a short routine to play them back, although about the bare minimum acceptable quality comes in at around 2K per second.

 

But, you could in theory just use the RAM under Basic and the OS, which would give you 22K to play with.

 

 

A future "project" which I'd like to do someday is to Disassamble SAM and remake it so that it can live under the OS, plus redo the sampling to use Pokey Timers which should make it work better in busy screen environments.

Edited August 8, 2010 by Rybags

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is there an easy way to put voice samples in a basic game?

 

Does any one have a routine written for this

also what format would it have to be in?

 

RAW or is there a way to put mod's in a basic program (with appropriate runtime player of course)

 

any help would be great.

 

Without the traditional samples, there's SAM as another poster said, I do think there's some replay routines on my page too

 

http://pokeysoft.no/games/atari/a8util.htm

 

Search for : Software Automated Mouth

[Kernal]

I believe i was mis understood.. how can i convert say a small wav file and put it in a proper format where it can be played back during a game as background music

 

and what format would i have to reconvert it to..

[Kernal]

such as the beware I live from sinistar.

[Kernal]

even if its in assembly thats fine

[Rybags]

Easiest way, load it up in Audacity, then export it as an 8-bit unsigned mono Raw file.

 

Next up, you need to convert it to 4-bit packed with 2 samples per byte. You can do that easily enough in the emulator with a Basic program, just run it in Turbo mode.

 

Aside from the space issue, you should also note that playing back samples will chew up a fair heap of CPU time.

[+Roydea6]

I believe i was mis understood.. how can i convert say a small wav file and put it in a proper format where it can be played back during a game as background music

 

and what format would i have to reconvert it to..

This thread may have an answer for you at Post #5.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/162258-adding-music-to-basic-programs/page__p__2000368?do=findComment&comment=2000368

 

CMC format.

[Kernal]

Easiest way, load it up in Audacity, then export it as an 8-bit unsigned mono Raw file.

 

Next up, you need to convert it to 4-bit packed with 2 samples per byte. You can do that easily enough in the emulator with a Basic program, just run it in Turbo mode.

 

Aside from the space issue, you should also note that playing back samples will chew up a fair heap of CPU time.

 

ok where can i find the listing for the program to convert the sample

and

what is the routine for loading it in the basic program..

[Heaven/TQA]

have a look here...

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/159626-gridrunner-final-round-pt-3/page__p__1979833__hl__gridrunner__fromsearch__1#entry1979833

[Kernal]

excellent. ok.. my only other question.. where does it load the actual file into memory.. and.. where should i put this in my program

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

 

to convert 8Bit WAV into 4Bit DIG (Parrot-Sample) format I used the WAVCONV.TUR program in the past. To play the sample back, I used DIGPLXE.BAS (for 128k machines) or DIGPLXL.COM (for 64k machines). These programs can be found on the disk-images SNDTOOLx.ATR - the players on side 1, the converters on side 2...

 

Later I also found a sample converter to convert 8Bit and 16Bit Amiga and PC samples into 4Bit Atari XL/XE samples. But I have not used this program, so I do not know if it really works. If you want to convert a WAV file or anything else with it, you have to rename it to *.SAM, because the converter allows only for *.SAM as input and *.SMP as output. The program and some small samples can be found on the disk-images SMPCONVx.ATR...

 

Study the DIGPLXE.BAS program (an Atari Basic program) to find out how 4Bit samples are played from Basic. Besides, the "Quick" programming language already contains routines to playback samples, but I am not sure if they are for 2Bit or 4Bit samples. Last not least if you want to have voice synthesis in your Basic program, study S.A.M. and the examples that are on the original disk (which I don`t have). Think there is one ML-program (included in SAM) that has to be called from Basic to enable voice synthesis, one example from my collection is a talking Eliza version (uses german language afaik, which sounds really strange), named Elisa.ATR - note that there are approx. six Eliza versions on the disk-image, but only one of them uses voice synthesis...

 

greetings, Andreas Koch.

smp_conv.zip

Edited August 8, 2010 by CharlieChaplin

[Kernal]

excellent thats what i needed mr. chaplin!

[+therealbountybob]

If anyone's looking for S.A.M. and the full manual, I found this nice site http://retrobits.net/atari/sam.shtml