At 07:32 PM 9/17/99 -0700, you wrote:
For what it's worth: I think I'll leave the more technical aspects to
the real geniuses here. Here's some trivia geek info from me.
Supposedly, voice is kind of possible on the 2600. To my
knowledge, one game tried it. Called "Quadrun" and released by Atari
sometime around when Intellivision and Odyssey were releasing their
I think the game came out a year or two after the voice modules. I don't
think it was a reaction to the voice modules.
voice modules, this game, according to a magazine put out by Atari
itself, would feature the word "Quadrun" said without any add-ons.
The voice in Quadrun is about as scratchy as the voice in Spike for the
Vectrex. At the time, samples didn't hold a candle to the quality
acheivable via discrete voice hardware (typically the Votrax SC-1 which was
used in most implementations). Also, hardware speech were sent simple
commands and ASCII phonetic or text to speech strings. Much more memory
efficient than samples.
There were some good examples, though. The speech in Atari 8-bit Berzerk
(still blanks the screen) and Software Automatic Mouth on same
platform. But having to blank the screen really limited its
usefulness. There was also a prototype 8-bit system (the 1400 series) that
had an SC-01 hacked into it, but its interface was very limited. The SC-01
supported pitch and speed controls, but I can't find any way to adjust them
or speak to the chip through anything other than its limited device handler.
If you wanted to do a voice game for the 2600 it might make sense to turn
it into a harware project and see if you can integrate an SC-01 onto the
cartridge. Speech would also probably be possible using the DPC chip that
Pitfall II used which automatically feeds the audio registers each scanline
without blanking the screen.
I think it's still pretty easy to find Votrax speech chips.
Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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