What I did this past weekend...

[mahlemiut]

Always have plenty of spare time on the weekends, so I decided to try to have some fun with MESS' recently added ability to dynamically support optional devices (ie: expansion devices and the like), and ended up doing this:
http://mess.redump.net/people:mahlemiut:blog:synthesize_this

[robcfg]

Hey, Awesome work!


If I remember correctly, we had some dumps of the SP0256 here in the forum. Are they all the same, or did Amstrad and DK'tronics use different allophones?

[mahlemiut]

As far as I am aware, both just used the internal allophones built into the SP0256.  Of course, if anyone knows differently, let me know.

[Bryce]

As far as I know, the standard allophones were released by the chip manufacturer and used by both DK and Amstrad, but there is space to save complete words or phrases too and DK had a few extra words saved there such as the "DKTroniks speech synthesiser" sentence that it say when you enter |speak.

Bryce. 

[Devilmarkus]

Well the allophones are fixed... You cannot change them.
The SPO has 59 allophones and 5 pause codes.

The phrase "DKTronics speech synthesiser" is stored in the DKTronics ROM as allophone table.
The ROM also contains the translation software which converts input text to the single allophones.
In the Amstrad SSA-1 synthesizer (without ROM) the conversion is done by the delivered software on tape.

Interesting is the difference in parsing integers.
When you enter |SAY,"5201" e.g.
DKTronics says "five two zero one"
SSA-1 says "fivethousandtwohundredone"

[Gryzor]

Interesting is the difference in parsing integers.
When you enter |SAY,"5201" e.g.
DKTronics says "five two zero one"
SSA-1 says "fivethousandtwohundredone"

Well, that's up to the software, not the allophone table, no?

[mahlemiut]

That would be right, converting text to speech is the job of the software, which will simply send the sounds/pauses to the sp0256.

[mahlemiut]

Another weekend, another device added to the MESS CPC driver.

This time, it's simply creating a basic ROM box expansion device.  Something that MESS has been lacking for a loooong time.



Here's a video too, demonstrating the ROM versions of Protext and Maxam in MESS -
http://mahlemiut.marpirc.net/cpc_romtest.avi

[mahlemiut]

And here's something I did earlier this week, adding support for daisy-chaining expansion devices to MESS, so that you can use more than one at a time.
Demonstration video:
http://mahlemiut.marpirc.net/cpcexp.avi
Note that you can't daisy-chain the Multiface II in 0.144, but has been added since.

[SyX]

Hi mahlemiut,

I'm a little lazy, what command line or config are you using in MESS to get the Speech emulation in the CPC?

[mahlemiut]

-exp ssa1 for the SSA-1, -exp dkspeech for the DK'Tronics speech synth.

Daisy-chaining works by effectively adding another expansion port to the expansion device.  So to do that, you can use -exp <device> -exp:<device>:exp <another device>.
eg: -exp dkspeech -exp:ssa1:exp rom  -- to use the DK'Tronics speech synth, and attach a ROMBox to it.

Do be aware that there are issues in the emulation of the SP0256 causing some games to fail detection of the SSA-1.  But you can get around that with a bit of debugger trickery...

[SyX]

THANKS!!!  It's perfect for my own test, i can not use in linux JavaCPC, and this's the perfect solution for me