Posted by M.Brent on February 01, 1999 at 17:21:09:
In Reply to: V9T9 - the Next Generation? posted by Greg Ember on January 13, 1999 at 20:29:55:
The last version of V9T9 that I have does in fact attempt
speech synthesis - badly, but if you know what it's supposed
to be saying, you can in fact make it out, and it's
recognizable.
One problem is the requirement of a true soundblaster card, as
he used to CTVOICE.DRV driver from Creative Labs (he realized
this as a mistake later, but it was too late then..)
As I understood it, Ed knew the compression formula, and how
to decompress it, but had to guess at most of the numbers which
are pre-set in the Speech Synthesizer. I have no idea how to extract
those numbers, and I've had little luck working with Ed's code,
as it's all assembly and that's just not my forte. ;)
Why anyone would officially state that emulating the speech synthesis
is impossible and requires reprogramming of a DSP (?!) is beyond me. :)
It might be interesting to take a look at the source for MAME (Multi-
Arcade Machine Emulator), as they've managed to crack a few speech
synthesis chips.. maybe one is close to TIs (or *is* TIs?)