Original speech synth with connector photos of guts

[+arcadeshopper]

I coulda swore I saw these somewhere, please to point them out.. If they don't exist I can dissassemble the one I just got.. but would rather not if this already exists.

[ti99iuc]

Maybe these pics? 

http://www.ti99.eu/?page_id=1705&lang=en

[+OLD CS1]

Hey, were these ports compatible with any of the "Speak &" modules?

[jrhodes]

13 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

Hey, were these ports compatible with any of the "Speak &" modules?

I think that was the plan George, but nothing became of it.

[+OLD CS1]

2 hours ago, jrhodes said:

I think that was the plan George, but nothing became of it.

Right, I remember reading that but I was wondering if it was ever tested.  I have a number of S&S and S&M cartridges around here.

[+Ksarul]

I know that the contents of the Speak and Spell cartridges are compatible with the TI, but I am not sure that the cartridge pin-out matches the speech synthesizer port. Michael Becker did some experimentation with Speak and Spell cartridge data a number of years ago when he was working on the SPVMC board. I think it may have even included a bunch of the Speak and Spell vocabulary in the board's built-in vocabulary.

 

I went back and checked my SPVMC manual. I was right. There is a LOT more vocabulary on that board than there is in the standard built-in vocabulary. Three 64K banks of speech memory are full. The card actually has five additional banks that are empty, but which can be filled with additional vocabulary (and the memory is flash memory, so the card will retain the data).

[+arcadeshopper]

14 hours ago, ti99iuc said:

Maybe these pics? 

http://www.ti99.eu/?page_id=1705&lang=en

THANK YOU!

[+arcadeshopper]

So question these guys took this thing apart did anybody bother to get a meter and figure out where all the connections were connected to?

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, arcadeshopper said:

So question these guys took this thing apart did anybody bother to get a meter and figure out where all the connections were connected to?

It looks like that header is still part of the final SS.

 

 

[+arcadeshopper]

It looks like that header is still part of the final SS.
 

 

So we should have all that info then

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[+OLD CS1]

17 minutes ago, arcadeshopper said:

So we should have all that info then

I am shocked that I have not found any schematics for it.

[wierd_w]

(silent musing about attaching Rpi GPIOs to the header, to combine with a TIPI for fully on-the-fly phoneme generation/call. The GPIO should respond fast enough, if you use a C library...)

 

There's also some capacitors missing. 

Edited August 19, 2021 by wierd_w

[Keatah]

What about that TI Language Translator? Remember that? How does that fit into their speech ecosphere?

[+FarmerPotato]

17 hours ago, arcadeshopper said:

So question these guys took this thing apart did anybody bother to get a meter and figure out where all the connections were connected to?

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk
 

It’s on my distant future To-Do list. Since Unicorn Electronics got surplus 6100 speech ROMs I’ve been wondering what’s inside.
 

 

[+FarmerPotato]

6 hours ago, Keatah said:

What about that TI Language Translator? Remember that? How does that fit into their speech ecosphere?

It’s an interesting device. It also took modules for French, Italian, German. Many others were planned. Datamath.org has good info.  

 

the issue between products with different speech chips is always: do they use the same LPC-10 bit format? Do they use the same coding tables? 
 

so far I think the answer to 1 is yes. I have recently found memos where the speech team weighed the advantages of changing the bit format after Speak n Spell, but opted to keep compatibility. 
 

as for 2, coding tables within the different speech chips do vary. Speech codes found in another ROM might play back, but can sound a bit off. 

For one thing, new speech coded with BlueWizard or pyWizard is not targeting the TI-99/4A speech chip. It targets the revised coding tables in TMS5220(C?) which is commonly available.

 

MAME has several coding tables . I brought those into BlueWizard, but I see little difference in results. (Most of my results are not great either way.)

 

 

My dad worked on ROMs for the translator. I recently found his papers, but no working devices or modules.

 

I found memos about experience gained from the translator project.   TI was still discovering how well the proposed coding tables worked for multiple languages.

Since June I’ve gained a lot of unpublished information on speech coding tables, but it’s a lot for me to read through. (And I can’t publish it.) it comes from the SMU archive and my dad’s house (mostly untouched since 1986.)

 

 

 

 

 

[+arcadeshopper]

I have updated my FAQ with pictures of this unit and the comparison between the boards.. any more info we figure out I'll add

 

[+FarmerPotato]

[globeron]

On 8/19/2021 at 11:31 PM, arcadeshopper said:

I have updated my FAQ with pictures of this unit and the comparison between the boards.. any more info we figure out I'll add

 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ti99ers/permalink/10153624439314844/   more pictures are here in different posts.