Posted by Tursi on September 20, 1999 at 07:14:30:
In Reply to: Re: TI Speech posted by Roger on September 18, 1999 at 22:25:23:
: Since Ed Swartz source code is available, why
: don't you just work on his sound section
: instead of developing a whole new program?
(Assuming you mean using his speech routines)
Because it doesn't work overly well, I don't understand the 5200 chip well enough to fix it, it's tied at a low level to the Creative Labs CT-VOICE DOS audio driver, and it's 100% assembly, which I also can't manipulate well.
I did not write a new program from scratch. I ported a module which is already-written, working, and used in a fair number of programs from the MAME project. All I had to do was write the interface to it. ;)
If you mean why don't I work on V9T9 as a whole instead of Ami99 - because there is no joy in that. I could just as easily ask "Why don't you? Why doesn't anyone else?" I looked at the code and found it hard to follow, because it's all assembly. V9T9 is fast, very tight, highly compatible, and a beautiful program. But it's difficult for someone new to pick it up and do anything with it... originally I looked into it just to fix the sprite collision bug (CALL COINC(ALL) compares the co-ordinates of the sprites instead of doing a pixel-comparison collision. You can verify this by writing a simple program in Extended BASIC that moves a pair of magnified dot sprites around and watches the collision - it will trigger when the sprites overlap, but there is no visible collision. A real TI only collides when the patterns overlap.) Anyway... I was unable to get anywhere near comfortable enough to implement this. I couldn't even begin to understand his sound routines when I went to try and port the digital sound routines away from the Creative Labs driver. This isn't his fault - he intended to produce a fast and accurate TI emulator, and he did a great job. But it's not something someone can jump into in an afternoon and modify.
All I can say is I guess I was wrong. I was starting to think that maybe there was enough interest to resume Ami99, but if the only comment I get on progress is "Why don't you work on something else?", then never mind.