Software Speech Synthesizers
With some clever programming it is possible to program a software Speech Synthesizer with good results.
These programs use pre-recorded allophones, unlike as with the hardware based SP0256 speech synthesizer chip, the allophones aren't computed an the fly. However, the overall result is the same: One can combine allophones to produce any kind of words and sentences, the software solution requires more memory and more CPU load though.
Speech! uses about 8K of memory for player and sample data. The samples are stored as packed 4-bit values to send to the AY. To play the speech delay loops are often used to control the frequency at which the AY is updated, and therefore the frequency of the sample. However, when Speech is playing the CPU time is effectively used completely until it is done, unless the player could be modified?
Games believed to use Software Speech Synthesizer
- LastV8 (Software)
Note - This list is very probably incorrect (Ghostbusters and Robocop were also listed here, which was incorrect, both games contain digitized speech, not synthesizing. Same may apply for LastV8, this isn't verified yet though) Note 2 - Does LastV8 contain any speech at all? The version from ftp nvg doesn't seem to have any speech in the intro... though maybe there is speech later in the game (?)
Games using Digitized Speech (Samples)
Digitized sound means a simple sound recordings (similar to modern .wav files). Unlike allophone based speech synthesizers, this method requires a lot of memory, typically allowing to store only a few words.
- Chase HQ
- Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja
- Super Robin Hood (Codemasters)
- Advanced Ski Simulator (Codemasters)
- Ghostbusters - 1bit samples (using PSG volume 00h and 0Fh)
- Robocop (with speech on CPC6128 only) - 4bit samples (using PSG volume 00h through 0Fh)
- Trantor - 4bit samples (using PSG volume 00h through 0Fh)
- Meltdown - digitized intro speech
- 3D Voice Chess - speech output for every move via samples