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AtariVox+ Few oddities


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3 hours ago, SmittyB said:

I've found it is possible to garble its speech by sending new commands while it's still playing but unlike before it actually recovers when it's finished. An example being starting Dungeon Stalker quickly, because I'm in PAL land there's no delay from the BIOS so I can have both sounds try to play at the same time.

 

I'm thinking of testing starting speech data with 255,31 which might work to put it into a known state if something interrupts it.

Ah, that's a shame. We implemented that in Dungeon Stalker without access to a PAL deck and AtariVox. No doubt Salvo does the same.

 

Heads up that 255 won't be sent to the vox, as Alex Herbert's driver will skip it.

 

That phrase in Dungeon Stalker already begins with a reset code, which embeds to 0,31. (the zero is there to add a non-harmful padding to complete any interrupted 2-byte instruction sent to the vox) 

 

By all means play around, but my guess is that a reset code can't correctly interrupt the speakjet startup sound. It might just be prudent to count off a number of frames under pal, to ensure the startup phrase is done.

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Thanks RevEng, that makes sense.

 

I was just trying to mess with the Dungeon Stalker speech again and actually it's much better than I thought, I just caught it at bad time before.

If the vox is making the initial sound effect then that is the most extreme but you can still hear it trying to say both phrases, albeit munging the phonemes. If it's already got to saying "Atarivox" then it will say "Atarivox plus dungeon stalker ready". When I was doing the same thing with a phrase I was making for SotA (much easier when it doesn't flip out at the slightest change of timings) I wasn't getting anything as confused but then I did change a few parameters like speed, pitch, and bend several times in the phrase.

 

I think the key is, if you're going to have a game where several phrases might play at the same time it'll work out as long as the parameters are similar. I'm now thinking that it might be a good idea to keep track of the last byte sent to the vox, and if it's 255 it should be safe to send another phrase without any odd effects.

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Interesting info. It sounds like the startup sound itself doesn't go into the queue.

 

Regular queued sounds should be able to cut each other off, if they begin with "reset" speechdata. I did quite a bit of testing on that. (of course, "reset" gets sent to the back of the current queue)

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  • 9 months later...
14 hours ago, bradhig1 said:

I am having the reset issues on both my 5200 with vcs adapter and my Sears Heavy Sixer.   Good to here there is a problem with the Atarivox itself and not my consoles.

Do you have the older Avox+ from a few years ago or is this a new one purchased recently? I had one of the older revisions of the Avox+ and once I removed the PIC IC chip off it, it has been working fine. Of course that also meant that I lose the ability to have speech with my Vectrex which, is why I've been meaning to pick up another one in the future and just haven't done it yet.

 

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