TI Trek 3: giving a 1980 Star Trek game a voice transplant for no good reason

[pixelpedant]

Well here’s something absolutely nobody asked for.  A version of TI Trek with every single speech sample replaced, using samples generated from actual Star Trek dialogue.  

 

Mostly, I just wanted a TMS5200/TMS5220 encoding project/experiment, and this seemed like low hanging fruit of particular interest to me, as a TI Trekkie.  But honestly, this was also an excuse to rewatch a bunch of TOS and The Animated Series. 

 

The result is here:  

 

 

TI-TREK3.DSK

 

 

This disk also contains the original TI Trek (and its samples).  To play the original TI Trek

 

OLD DSK1.TI-TREK
RUN

 

To play TI Trek modified to use the new samples

 

OLD DSK1.TI-TREK3
RUN

 

Both the programs (which are really the same program - only the sample source file differs) will assume that they are in DSK1.  Since it uses CALL SAY (as originally supported by Speech Editor but subsequently by XB), it will make sense to play it via XB if using speech.  

 

TI Trek’s manual can be found here:

 

TI Trek manual B&W.pdf

 

And a TI planning document on the game is available here:

 

TI-Trek.pdf

 

TI Trek is of course a grid-based Star Trek game after the tradition of Super Star Trek (and its multitude of progeny) which TI released in 1980.  It’s written in TI BASIC, and uses disk-based speech samples - 36 of them.  

 

Each speech event in TI Trek reads two successive 255 byte INT/FIX records and speaks those two records concatenated via CALL SAY, providing for 18 different speech events in all, with each one consisting of up to 252 + 252 = 504 bytes of actual LPC data, which works out to about two seconds of speech per event.  

 

I talk more about all this and play it a bit, here:

 

 

 

 

 

Blue Wizard was used for encoding.  This was generally satisfactory given an optimal input sample, but few samples in this particular case were optimal, as I was taking audio from a television production with a great deal of atmospheric and musical noise and highly varied rates of speech, and post-processing could only do so much to isolate vocals.  

  

Some deviation from expected outcomes (when played via TI-99 speech synth module) is I would theorise otherwise resultant from Blue Wizard using TMS5220 reflection coefficients similar but non-identical to TMS5200 values.  But I’m not an expert on the version differences concerned, there.  

 

This was a fun little experiment.  

 

[Nick99]

With that speech I feel that the game is more interesting. Great work! 

[twoodland]

This is awesome!  Thank you so much.

[+Vorticon]

Definitely adds a new dimension to the game. Nicely done!

Incidentally, Adamtyr did a fantastic remake of TI Trek in XB called Super Trek which could definitely benefit from that voice enhancement. Perhaps you two should connect

 

 

Strek.dsk

 

[RedBaron]

This is some great work.  I am so glad that I am not the only one still interested in the TI994a and trying to extend its capabilities.

 

[pixelpedant]

4 hours ago, Vorticon said:

Definitely adds a new dimension to the game. Nicely done!

Incidentally, Adamtyr did a fantastic remake of TI Trek in XB called Super Trek which could definitely benefit from that voice enhancement. Perhaps you two should connect

Yeah, there are certainly more lavish treatments of Super Star Trek for TI-99. 

 

I just gave TI Trek this treatment since it was the original and a pioneer for its implementing speech in BASIC even before Extended BASIC had released. 

 

Mike de Frank's Super Star Trek is another good one:

 

 

SUPERTREK.DSK

 

For Extended BASIC. Run via

 

RUN "DSK1.TREK"