Відео

Great! Thanks. Makes a LOT of sense! I have SKQQ too and it only makes noises. I did figure out that SKQQ is the slave ROM to some unknown master ROM, and that SHAO/D is a master ROM without its slave ROM. What you have found out is never discussed in any of the old data sheets. You and I appear to be some of the very few out here who are trying to unravel the secrets of how this system actually works. Someone outbid me on that board that has 54104 processor plus SSR 1,2,5,6. Was that you by chance? :)

@@leroyjones6958 yes that was me. sorry. I DID trace the schematic out, though if you want it! I dumped the four ROMs and they match the existing dumps so you can just burn the data to an EPROM/flash chip and use that. I reverse engineered the chip 100% back in 2007 and wrote an emulator for it. The datasheet is intentionally vague on how it works. It is pretty straight forward, though. each word is a list of 3 byte entries pointing to sample pieces. first byte is repeats/sample length and stop flag, next two bytes is pointer to the data, and encoding type. weirdly the word pointers are big endian and the sample pointers are little endian. this is why without the first half of the data the sample data is nearly impossible to decode. it is missing repeat count and lengths and the order they are used.

@@kevtris So how did that complete set on that board turn out? Do all of the Digitalker ICs work correctly? I am not quite well enough up to speed quite yet to be able to dump and burn my own ROMs. Close though. I do have and use a home m,ade EPROM programmer that uses parallel port and is operated by a script I wrote for it in Crosstalk Mar 4, version 2.0. That runs in DOS. Currently using an old IBM 750 P90 machine. I also want to learn enough more so that I can eventually use the venerable 600 word library for Digitalker words that is on github. At present however I am still at the stage of rounding up what existing ROMs I can find. I only have (2) sets of SSRs 5 and 6. Would like to find more. but as it ended up, you wanted that board more than I did because at the end it was getting a bit too rich for my blood. I am wanting to have a serious Digitalker collection. I use it in a telephone system as a piece of "common pool" equipment. The outstanding feature of Digitalker is its speech clarity and ease of use. Hey did you notice how poorly sounded-out the words are on that game chip? Does not even sound like Digitalker, sounds more like SPO-256. That ROM must not have been coded using Mozer's patented method. What do you think?

@@leroyjones6958 yeah all the chips seemed to work. The reason I was interested in it was to trace out the circuit on the board; it is designed to plug into an apple 2 and give it digitalker capability. The design is pretty interesting and wasn't quite finished but it was 99% of the way there. it would've worked as-is and with 1 minor modification been perfectly usable. He used JK flipflops that toggle each time it is written to, so you could change between SSR1/2 and SSR5/6 but there was no way to know which set was in use! I have a complete schematic of the board now. As for the sound quality, it indeed is pretty poor on that SHAQ chip (it's actually SHAQ and not SHAO. Q = ceramic DIP, N = plastic I think) and I think there is a reason it does not have the "mozer" name on it. It is monotone and indeed sounds like it was made out of phonemes and I too thought it sounded very sp0256 like. Speaking of, I have a big collection of SP0256 and SP0264 chips and their associated speech ROMs, and have dumped all of those as well. hit up my email and I can send you an EPROM with several digitalker sets in it if programming them is difficult for you, so long as you're in the US. you can find it on my web page. search for my youtube username and it should come right up then the contact page. I have a lot of speech synthesis related stuff up.

Probably right.

PSTN only. 🌎

Thanks! That was in GTE's western division. I started working at GTE eastern division in Florida right at the end of the GTE era. I worked there my first year when it was still under GTE management. Then it became Verizon, which was a joining of Bell Atlantic and GTE. Worked my first 6 months trial period as a CO installer running cables, adding new frames, etc. Then they sent me out to Phoenix Arizona to GTD5 school. After that school I was upgraded to "Test Engineer" and was expected to supervise CO install crews then test and turn up what they installed. Every GTD5 office within a 50 mile radius of my home office (Tampa) had and still has one of these Proctor 51200 test sets. They can all be reached by dialing 112 or 958-1110.

I cut it short because this was just the intro video. There are 2 more vids that take you through all 512 possible addresses and those include the complete vocabulary and all of the noises.

1) No. 2) Probably yes, they were used in elevators, cash registers, lots of places. No doubt some hams use them in repeaters. 3) Nope. The explanation of the basic workings of Digitalker are that the 8 bit starting address of the selected word to be spoken is put on the processor data bus. Then when the NOT W/R pin goes high that latches the data into a register and that sends the appropriate starting address out to the ROM for scanning. Each word has its own scan of multiple ROM addresses which sound out the word. Digitalker does NOT use phonemes (or allophones as they are sometimes called), such as SPO-256-AL2 does. SPO-256 is fun to work with too, but it is not nearly as understandable as Digitalker. On my test circuit used in these videos, there are 9 bits. The highest order bit selects SSR 1 and 2 for the basic vocabulary, that is selected when bit 9 is low. When bit 9 is high, SSRs 5 and 6 are selected for access to the extended vocabulary.

It is a 40 pin processor. Digitalker 54104 speech processor. Runs at 4 mHz.

In the days of the old electro-mechanical telephone network, most exchanges of any size had these test numbers. The term "supervision" comes from the old operator cord boards on which there was a lamp for each line. When that line was in the "off-hook" or "answered" condition, the supervision lamp on the operator's board would light up, letting her know the line was in use. As time progressed, and after Direct Distance Dialing (DDD) came out, then people could dial their own long distance calls. In order to keep track of how long they talked and then to bill them accordingly, some automatic way to monitor the "supervision" of every line had to be implemented. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In this way, the old "supervisory" lamp circuits for operators slowly got redefined and used for billing. In a step office such as mine, when a called line answers and goes "off-hook" the line DC polarity reverses. This is known as "reversed polarity supervision". It can be seen in this video on the ammeter which monitors the testboard's outgoing line. That meter has zero at the center. RIGHT of center is STRAIGHT line polarity with Tip being positive and Ring being negative. When the meter needle passes through zero and goes left of center, that is reversed polarity. Remember it this way "Left is the REVERSE of normal". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So a supervision test is a number that when called acts like someone picking up and hanging up a phone. Its purpose is to test the action of the supervisory relays. Hope this helps explain. Please go look up Evan Doorbell and all of his old phone tapes. He explains it all in much greater detail. Keep the questions coming guys! I am happy to answer them all!

Yes. Card #4. Sweep Tone Tests. There are two sweep tests on that card. Coming up soon. Stay Tuned. 😎

Yes that is likely true too. Back in those days, some long distance trunks were fairly faint, rather noisy, and low in level. Then after a few of them would be stacked end-to-end as was done quite frequently, the transmission was not only low in level, but quite flat in frequency response as well. It then amounted to a very tinny sounding, far away, noisy connection that sometimes was difficult to talk through. Operators in those days were required to pronounce numbers in a very specific way to be understood through such connections. Instead of just saying "nine" she would say "NYE---Uhhn". Not unlike the phonetic alphabet and numbers used by pilots and military. (they say nine-er). But that ubiquitous "BAWWWWP" of old city-dialtone burst when a long distance call picked up was a big part of my boyhood telephone memories. So I brought it back on my private exchange, so that we can continue to enjoy it! ⚔⚡⚡

@@leroyjones6958 I was an AT&T TSPS operator in summer 1987 and there were a few old biddies in the office who had stories! Apparently they used to "accidentally" brush a colleague with ringing current on a cord when bored! (I then moved on to 1A2 installation, and eventually PBX's like Horizon and Dimension - all gone now!) Love your setup!

@@AlexisKasperavicius Oh yes. I remember when TSPS was brand new! We phone phreaks called it "tiss-piss" because it thwarted many good old hacks such as down-upping the hookswitch at just the right time to interrupt the ANI MF spill that the 4A machine downtown issued out to the CAMA equipment. We called this humble procedure "CAMA Fraud" and here is how it worked: After down-upping the hookswitch just as the 4A was about to go "ka-BEEP-click", there would be a long delay, a ring, and then a CAMA operator would come on and ask for the originating number because ANI failed so now they must ask. Well it turns out that in a crossbar #1 office such as my phone at the time was in, those CAMA operators could accept anything in the local marker group of the originating exchange. In my case the local marker group consisted of (4) prefixes so that amounted to my choice of 40,000 numbers to give her. As long as it was in this group, the call would go through after she entered it. I'd usually give her a test number such as a sweep tone or loop-around or something. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TSPS put an abrupt end to that. But then a few months later after high school a girl I knew from school hired on as a TSPS operator. I would dial 411 and play operator roulette until she answered and I'd say hello to her using her name and she'd freak out until she realized it was me! Because back at that time they routed directory assistance out to the then brand new TSPS center. Good times. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It all went away. So I have had to build my own. I do also have a little 1A2 that works in a 5 member hunt group in the stepper.

The thumbwheels are used for setting. The smaller clock is much simpler. It only has 17 ICs total. It uses (6) of the 74HC160 synchronous counters. In an effort to minimize complexity and parts count, the thumbwheels also serve as the number loaded on the next clockpulse after either 23:59:59 (for 24 hour mode), or 12:59:59 in 12 hour mode. As seen in the video, it is operating in 24 hour mode, so the thumbwheels must be left at 0000 so that it goes to that at midnight. If it was in 12 hour mode, the thumbwheels need to be set to 0100 to make it work correctly. When ever this clock gets set, those wheels must be returned to those values otherwise timekeeping won't work. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The other larger clock uses about 42 ICs and is much more complex. It has a settable alarm. The keyboard is used to set time, set alarm, turn the tubes on and off, select 12 or 24 hour mode, and keyboard also controls the seconds counter, zeroing it then holding it until time to turn it loose. When I built that one in 1994, I wanted an easily settable clock. Just punch in the numbers. Easy to set, hard to build. it is all wirewrapped. The larger older clock uses a pair of 74LS160 counters for seconds. Minutes and hours are 74LS192. Those turned out to need help resetting to values less than ten, with the aid of 74LS221 pulse maker (monostable multivibrator) to assure a reset pulse of a defined interval instead of attempting to reset on a spike. I realize now that 74LS192 is not an ideal counter to make a clock out of for this reason, but it's done long ago, works real well and so I leave it that way. The most recent effort, a clock based upon the rare 74142 counter/driver........it needs help too. had to actually add 3 more counters to "supervise" the 74142s. But that clock operates ok, and the parts count for it is 16 ics. So I actually beat my old record of fewest ICs by one IC. Those old old TTL counters are hard to reset properly on the fly to make them be modulo 6 instead of modulo 10, and then the entire modulo 24 business gets even stranger yet. But a 4024 binary counter came to the rescue there, because bits "16" and "8" are ANDed together, so it spits out a nice pulse when N=24. It needed a 74HC221 to make a solid reset pulse of 100 uS. 74142, by far not the most efficient way, but has it ever even been done before? I wonder.

@@leroyjones6958 That's Genius. Thanks so much for sharing and inspiring.

Nope. I wish it did but since there is only ONE of the Digitalker units available, when ever the bus controller assigns one of the 8 ports of Digitalker, to one of the specific applications, all of the other 7 remaining ports are held in a waiting que until Digitalker is again available after the first call disconnects. It is a "first come, first served" type of arrangement. For instance it is set up so that when Digitalker is busy elsewhere and the talking clock line is called, it will not even answer the call until the bus is selected for Digitalker to be assigned to the clock. It is 8 ports, but only one at a time can be serviced. (it is expandable too by the way, if it ever needs 8 more) 😎

@@leroyjones6958 Wow, thanks for the write up! Very interesting-and such a beautiful setup you have there. Looks like a lot of fun! Please keep the videos coming! :)

The diode matrix translates a "1-of-200" contact closure into an 8-bit binary number. (two hex digits). The hex line ID numbers range from 01 through C8, with 00 reserved for testing. Since there are 5 linefinders, the ANI must scan across them until it finds the one which has the call to the ANI. That happens when you hear those fast little beeps. The beeps are the ANI scanning. Once the proper linefinder is identified, then a 48 volt signal is sent to back jack pin 5 on it. That 48 volts flows through the linefinder and then out on either the A or the A1 bank wiper, which has landed upon those bank contacts which represent the line I.D. of the calling line. That signal then flows through a 200 conductor cable, over to the diode matrix, which generates the 8-bit line I.D. code, which it then sends over to the ANI on those 3 boards on the table across the room. There, that 8-bit line I.D. code then gets turned over to a 2732A EPROM which has been programmed to act as the translation table that contains all of the phone numbers associated with all 200 of the 8-bit line I.D. numbers. Those phone number digits then get passed along to Digitalker so it can be spoken and at the same time it is fed to the flashing green 7 segment readout, which shows the calling phone number one digit at a time as it gets spoken.

Thank you! It was a long hard slog. The first time it talked was really glorious. That came after 2 months of work. It has been in service in its temporary configuration now since 2015. Most of the bugs are out of it now. :)

Thanks! Just swapped out several of the old 7400 style ICs in that RatShack keyboard. Installed a variety of CMOS ones such as HC, C, HCT, and had to settle for a few LS ones in sockets where none of the CMOS ones seem to operate correctly. But now have total keyboard current down to 90 mA, where as originally it sucked up 450 mA!