[sjt99]

Anyone familiar with the inner workings of the TI Speech Synthesizer?
I got one recently that doesn't work correctly. It makes sounds but they are not words. There are a total of 4 chips in it. One I assume is the sound generator, a flip flop, and 2 piggy backed chips that appear to be roms.
My assumption is the roms hold the data for the vocabulary and are another TI proprietary design, like a grom.
I saw rom dumps somewhere, but if the chips are special, how could they be duplicated?

Anyone had any experience restoring one of these?

Steve

[ksarul]

The stacked chips are the speech ROMs, as you suspected--and they are a proprietary chip. I may have the specs on them (I'll have to check one of my TI notebooks at work tomorrow). The speech chip is similar to a TMS5220 (it is marked as a TMS0385, IIRC). There are some differences, but they are minor. I finally acquired a copy of the speech chip manual a couple of years ago from one of the original TI engineers. Until that point, the document was considered lost. The one for the TMS5220 is easy enough to find though, so it was not a major issue.

[sjt99]

The stacked chips are the speech ROMs, as you suspected--and they are a proprietary chip. I may have the specs on them (I'll have to check one of my TI notebooks at work tomorrow). The speech chip is similar to a TMS5220 (it is marked as a TMS0385, IIRC). There are some differences, but they are minor. I finally acquired a copy of the speech chip manual a couple of years ago from one of the original TI engineers. Until that point, the document was considered lost. The one for the TMS5220 is easy enough to find though, so it was not a major issue.

Jim
Thanks for the info,
I realize they are out there cheap (complete units)
It's just fun to check this out at this stage.
Since I can't replace the roms maybe I'll try and find the speech chip.
Possibly I'll just get another unit and pull the chips and swap them to answer the question.
Has anyone plugged in a 5220 chip?

Steve