About the AtariVox Club

[+Nathan Strum]

Welcome to the AtariVox Club!

 

Here's a little background on why I created this Club.

 

I first heard about the AtariVox when the homebrew game Man Goes Down was in development, programmed by Alex Herbert. Alex created the programmer's guide for the AtariVox, and was among its earliest adopters (if not the first). This is the most recent version of his programmers guide that I'm aware of:

 

atarivox-programmers-guide.zip

 

I first heard the AtariVox itself after I won the contest to create the label for the game. One of the prizes was an AtariVox. I worked with Alex for some time on creating the manual for the game, but he had some health issues, and stepped away from the homebrew scene. Man Goes Down was never completed, nor released.*

 

I reviewed the AtariVox in my blog a couple of years later. It was a great little box with a lot of potential, but I felt it was underutilized, and under-appreciated.

 

A few months later, I posted another blog entry, asking programmers for help in finding a way to create phrases for the AtariVox. Not long afterwards, I got a USB interface from Richard Hutchinson, that allowed me to use the AtariVox with Stella, rather than only on a real 2600.

 

The problem though, was that the software you needed to actually design phrases for the AtariVox - Phrase-A-Lator - remained Windows-only, and I'm a Mac user.

 

And most definitely not a programmer.  

 

Time passed, and while AtariVox support was added to more games, few of them really took advantage of its speech capabilities.

 

That is, until Wizard of Wor Arcade, programmed by John Champeau.

 

The voices, created by Mike Haas (iesposta), had been done for an extensive hack of the original CBS version of Wizard of Wor. As that project languished and John began working on his own version, Mike's voices found a new home, and the AtariVox finally got a chance to really shine.

 

Wizard of Wor Arcade has over 70 phrases that play through the AtariVox, recreating the distinct, taunting voice of the original arcade game. The voices are such a key part of the game, a multi-port adapter is being developed, to allow two-players and AtariVox support at the same time. (Okay... to be fair, the actual goal was for four joysticks to be plugged in, but this is a side-benefit.  )

 

Working on the graphics for Wizard of Wor Arcade and all of the play-testing that involved, really re-ignited my interest in developing phrases for homebrew games using the AtariVox. And I had my first target firmly in sight: Gorf.

 

Gorf is one of my all-time favorite arcade games. I played it a lot with my friends in the arcades back-in-the-day, and the mocking tone of its voice synthesis always made the "us vs. them" aspect of it that much more fun. When John decided to tackle Gorf as an upcoming project, I really wanted to create the voices for it. Mike did a fantastic job on Wizard of Wor Arcade, but I wanted to have some fun with the AtariVox, too!  

 

Although it "only" has about 30 phrases, when you pad them out with the different player rankings ("Got you, Space Cadet!" "Got you, Space Captain!" etc.), it amounts to over 100.

 

But I still had no way to create the phrases. I figured I'd have to run Phrase-A-Lator in a Windows virtual machine, just to make this happen. I searched for all of the information I could find on the AtariVox and the SpeakJet chip inside of it, and was about to order up a license of Windows to run in Parallels, when I stumbled across this blog post by Mike Saarna (RevEng).

 

That changed everything.

 

In 2011, he'd developed his own version of Phrase-A-Lator, called Speakalator. But this wasn't for Windows - it was for Unix. And Mac OS X is based on Unix. (In fact, until Apple abandoned X11 a few years ago, you could just run Unix apps on Macs. You still can, presumably, but it's no longer included from Apple.) How did it take me nine years to find this?

 

I reached out to RevEng, and asked if it was possible for him to compile a Mac version of Speakalator. Fortunately, he said yes! Now - I don't know how much work he had to go through to get it there, but within a few days, and a few back-and-forth attempts, we had it up and running on my Mac laptop, happily talking to my AtariVox, and spewing out threats of a Gorfian Doom!

 

I became so obsessed (and had so much fun), I worked through all of the phrases for the game in a single weekend. John created a few test binaries as I refined the voices, and AtariAge user Machine provided some video of his arcade Gorf machine for us to compare it against.

 

And now... I want to do more. (And we will... so stay tuned!)

 

But more than that, I want to see others do more with the AtariVox. I'd planned to start up this club some weeks ago, but I've been quite preoccupied recently (besides the whole COVID-19 outbreak), and hadn't had the time. But this post from Andrew Davie was the final motivator. So I thought I'd start up this Club, and try to bring together all of the AtariVox knowledge and enthusiasts together into one place, so people would have someplace to ask questions and get answers. Hopefully along the way we can improve the tools and resources available, share code samples and tips, and really make the AtariVox a must-have device for the homebrew scene.

 

Let's have some fun!

 

- Nathan

 

 

* Alex's last update for the Man Goes Down was posted here. He's an incredibly nice guy - he actually felt bad for not finishing up Man Goes Down because of the work I'd put into the label and manual, and sent me copies of his Vectrex Hombrews as a consolation: Protector (a Defender clone) and Y.A.S.I. (Space Invaders).

 

To my knowledge, he most recently posted in the News section of his website in November of 2014 that his Vectrex homebrews were available at Packrat videogames, but I've heard nothing since then. Many attempts have been made to reach him. Above all else - I hope he's doing well!

[RevEng]

That's a great list of resources, Nathan! Let me add a little more...

 

Using the AtariVox with batari basic:

• bB AtariVox Support, Part 1... the AtariVox EEPROM
• bB AtariVox Support, Part 2... Basic Voice Functionality
• bB AtariVox Support, Part 3... More Natural Sounding Voices

It's also worth mentioning that 7800basic has AtariVox speech support, in addition to high score table and/or save slot saving to the AtariVox EEPROM or HSC cart.

 

Lastly, the inexpensive SaveKey dongle is basically an AtariVox EEPROM, without the voice functionality.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Nice coincidence, wondering if Stella might be able to emulate it, I did some AVox research just yesterday.  

 

I stumbled on a litte Windows program named ChipTalk, which emulates the SPO256-AL2 the SpeakJet is based on. Nothing great, but maybe a start.

 

BTW: I found the club myself, because I got no invitation notice.

Edited March 22, 2020 by Thomas Jentzsch

[+Nathan Strum]

16 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

BTW: I found the club myself, because I got no invitation notice.

I sent you an invitation notice.  You were right at the top of my list.

[RevEng]

16 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Nice coincidence, wondering if Stella might be able to emulate it, I did some AVox research just yesterday.  

 

I stumbled on a litte Windows program named ChipTalk, which emulates the SPO256-AL2 the SpeakJet is based on. Nothing great, but maybe a start.

I will say that SP0256 is emulated in MAME, under a BSD license. If one were to incorporate Robert H's conversion table and the SP0256 driver, you'd be most of the way to a functional AtariVox driver.

 

Of course, I'm aware it's much easier said than done.

[+stephena]

We've borrowed code from MAME before, so that shouldn't be a problem.

[+Nathan Strum]

23 hours ago, Nathan Strum said:

I sent you an invitation notice.  You were right at the top of my list.

Proof!  

I knew I'd sent you an invite. I blame the wonky forum software.

[RevEng]

Careful now, he's really good with image editing apps. ?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Nevermind

Edited March 24, 2020 by Thomas Jentzsch

[+SpiceWare]

On 3/21/2020 at 9:38 PM, Nathan Strum said:

I reached out to RevEng, and asked if it was possible for him to compile a Mac version of Speakalator. Fortunately, he said yes! Now - I don't know how much work he had to go through to get it there, but within a few days, and a few back-and-forth attempts, we had it up and running on my Mac laptop, happily talking to my AtariVox, and spewing out threats of a Gorfian Doom!

Did @RevEng post the Mac version anywhere?  If so I've not had any luck finding it.

[RevEng]

I didn't. The binary I cobbled together for Nathan was a bit of a package abomination, where I had to tarball some of the brew-provided dependencies. There's just so many library dependencies in a gtk-app that my preferred Mac OS distribution method - a tarball of a static compile - is untenable.

 

I'll take a look at folding in the updates we made to the speakalator source back into the github (it wasn't a lot, in the end), along with build instructions using brew. I don't think I'm the guy to put together an official Mac OS binary though, as I rarely use the platform.

[+Nathan Strum]

An official Mac build would be fantastic! Speakalator is a great tool. A tad buggy here and there though.  But definitely appreciated. I'll be firing it back up this weekend to work on another project, so I'll post some notes about some of the things that could use a little polishing.