Hi, maybe I can found a digitalker MM54104 chip (speech sintesys) for experimenting, from a quite long time desire (about 30 years)
but I have not the vocabulary roms MM52164 SSR1 / SSR2 / SSR3 in the datasheet are named as MAXI-ROM (at that epoch...) now 8Kbytes made me smile. Does anyone have, or can, make, a dump of those roms?
I also read about someone who try to understand the data prodution methodology from audio (interesting but not my actual goal).
tia delo
You *do* realize that the DigiTalker approach was *canned* speech? I.e., the vocabulary ROMs are exactly that -- the (complete) set of words that your 54104 will be able to speak.
If you are looking for less constrained speech, your best bet is something like the SC01(A)/SC02 or an SP0256 (I forget the name of the Artic chip...). Or, a genuine Votrax board set (e.g., VS6.3).
Nowadays, of course, the approach is just to emulate this functionality in software...
Hi Don,
Yes I know there are many other speech devices like, for example, SP0256 ( of this one iI try the emulation sw) and understand the limitations of the "canned" vocabulary.
About 1988 I scavenge an old telecom subscriber line card and recover the M5161 codec chip, then I made a parallel port interface to my olivetti m290 and play with turbopascal (ver 3.2) , recording, replay, take pieces, my cousin use it as final assignement in high school developing a text to speech...
Only I remenber the digitalker data-sheet and like to try it, if I found all the necessary materials i.e. chip and roms (images)
bye and thanks delo
..
I think you will find ROM images hard to come by. You may find actual
*devices* (NOS) sitting on a shelf or in someone's goodie bin, though. Note that each device has different CE polarity if you do come across some! [Also, be careful how you read them. Some "smart" PROM PROGRAMMERS will gag on masked ROMs -- even if they have pinouts identical to EPROM counterparts! Best bet is a DUMB PROM reader -- even if you have to build it from scratch!]Good luck!
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