The voice came from a DECtalk DTC01, a not inexpensive voice synthesizer first made in 1984 that also gave voice to for many years.
If you listened to the National Weather Service Weather Radio in the US about 25 years ago, you’ll no doubt remember, one of the synthesized voices used to read current conditions and weather forecasts. If you like modern expansions giving old computers new life, did you know that you can get just about any retro computer online, perhaps a TRS-80, an Amiga and even a Psion Organizer? And if you’re interested in just using old systems’ sound chips with modern USB MIDI controllers, it’s easy to make a microcontroller do all the heavy lifting.Ĭontinue reading “Giving The Amstrad CPC A Voice And A Drum Kit” → Posted in Retrocomputing Tagged amstrad cpc, chiptune, DECtalk, drum machine, midi controller, MIDI instrument, retro, sampler, speech synthesis Finally, by using the UART interface included on the LambdaSpeak, you can also turn the CPC itself into a synth by giving it MIDI in/out and interfacing a controller in real time with the computer’s AY-3-8912 sound chip. Sample playback can also be used alongside the speech synthesis as shown here, with random allophone beats that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Kraftwerk recording.
This can be used for a drum machine sequencer program, and it has an Amdrum mode, emulating another expansion from the original Amstrad days. By default, the card offers this mode with an Epson S1V30120 daughterboard (which is based on DECTalk synthesis), however for further authenticity you also have the option of fitting it with an SP0256-AL2 chip, the same one used in the original Amstrad hardware in 1985.Īs for the more musical part of the project, the board supports 4-channel PCM playback, much like the Amiga’s sound offering.
#DECTALK EMULATOR FOR MAC SOFTWARE#
has made an emulation mode where his card can act just like the original SSA-1 expansion, being able to be controlled by the same software as back then. is trying to bring some of that and many more features to the Amstrad CPC with his ambitious LambdaSpeak 3 project, an expansion card built completely up from scratch and jam-packed with features.įirst, and likely giving it its name, is the speech synthesizer.
Arguably, it wasn’t until the advent of 16-bit computers such as the Amiga that musicians could make soundtrack-quality music without having to plug actual studio gear up to their machines. Back in the ’80s, home computers weren’t capable of much in terms of audio or multimedia as a whole.
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