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Some boards from Chandler


BSRSteve

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What's at the end of the ribbon cable?

 

My guess is that these are speech ROM development boards.  A developer would create speech ROM binary code that is intended to extend the standard SP0256-AL2 chip (close relative of the Intellivoice's SP0256-12 chip), burn that code onto an EPROM, and place it into the correct chip socket (each chip socket sits at a different address in the 64K address range of the SP0256).  Later, the developer could sent the final version of the ROM code to GI who would burn it into a SPR0128-xxx chip (the 0128 varies by the size of the data, the xxx is a number that varies by the code contents).  The SPR-X is a special chip that that adapts the SP0256's serial ROM bus into standard EPROM chip signals.  The 74138 chip is a 3-to-8 decoder that translates 3 high-ish address lines into 8 chip selects (1 chip select per socket).

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That board lets you load it with EPROMs containing speech data, and the SPR-X emulates the SPR-016/SPR-128 speech ROMs.  The former holds 2K of speech data, the latter holds 16K of speech data. 

 

The SPO256-012 chip used in the 'voice is custom programmed with the "mattel electronics presents",  then numbers 0-9, "ten" "twenty" etc.  All of that speech fits into its internal 2K of ROM.   The chip on the board is an SPO256-AL2 which was a stock version of the chip loaded with allophones you could buy from places like Radio Shack.

 

This board lets you develop your speech data that will be mask programmed into an SPO256, and then emulate it in circuit using that cable and plug.    Interestingly, any SPO256 chip can be used to emulate any other by using the external ROM bus mode, so they took advantage of this.  That board lets you stuff up to 32K bytes of data, which is far more than the chip can normally hold (2K), but I suspect it's designed to let you develop devices with more than 2K of ROM, like the Odyssey^2 "the voice".  It has 16K of external speech ROMs to go with the 2K of internal ROM.

 

The intv only has the 2K of built in ROM, though (I believe they called it "resrom").  Any other data had to be manually poked into a FIFO chip on the intellivoice to get it into the SPO256-012 that resides on it.

 

I don't think you could do that with this dev board though;  the serial speech ROM bus is being used by the FIFO. 

 

 

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6 hours ago, cmart604 said:

Very cool. ?? Thanks for sharing these pics. Any other interesting stuff from Chandler? 

Mostly we have the papers that are posted on http://papaintellivision.com

 

There are a few other small chips that I thought I had brought home, but I guess I didn't. And several boxes of business cards that I doubt have much general interest (though I have been wrong about things like that before)

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3 minutes ago, BSRSteve said:

Mostly we have the papers that are posted on http://papaintellivision.com

 

There are a few other small chips that I thought I had brought home, but I guess I didn't. And several boxes of business cards that I doubt have much general interest (though I have been wrong about things like that before)

Haha. Never underestimate the level of crazy amongst some collectors. 

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8 hours ago, BSRSteve said:

Mostly we have the papers that are posted on http://papaintellivision.com

 

There are a few other small chips that I thought I had brought home, but I guess I didn't. And several boxes of business cards that I doubt have much general interest (though I have been wrong about things like that before)

If you have time, please share the business cards. It’s always interesting to know “who’s who in the zoo”.

 

 

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