I'm the person that ported the TI-99/4A to the MiSTer FPGA. I didn't realize allophones didn't work until watching your video. I've just committed a fix, and it will show up in the next release. FYI, I took the actual LPC conversion code from FPGA code written by DAR, which is based on MAME, but should be fairly accurate to the actual device. I added the rest of the synth logic (speech rom handling, interface, etc). There is room for improvement, but the behavior should be fairly close. This is all being done in the FPGA. The reason it didn't work was that the speech synthesizer has a "not ready" signal that can disable the CPU when it's FIFO buffer is full. Apparently, the Terminal Emulator 2 cart, just sends the data as quickly as it can, and that can overflow the buffer, so stalling the CPU is necessary. After seeing your video, it only took me 15 minutes to hook up the signal (and a couple hours to compile and test), and it started working.
Very cool, thank you for your work on the 4A core and for identifying and resolving the TE2 issue! I will be sure to test it out when the next release ships. Cool you were able to diagnose it so easily and wish I had those skills :)
I'm glad somebody is doing emulation for the TI. I thought about getting a Mister eventually. Right now I use a cheap android box or hook up a laptop on my arcade kiosk I put together.
I think that the TI gets forgotten about, so I really enjoyed this video. It was a pretty popular machine for a while in the early 80s. When I was nine, we had the TI running on a color TV and a cassette player/recorder. Another family was nice enough to let us borrow their speech synthesizer for a few days. I was blown away by Alpiner with speech. I remember typing CALL SAY a lot. That might have been in Extended Basic. It was a different feeling using a home computer back then. We felt like we were directly accessing the machine, instead of it being a magic box that it feels like today.
Good luck finding everything! There are some cool new products for the system as well such as the FinalGrom cart, TIPI, and NanoPEB that I've been meaning to try out. A new RPG (Realms of Antiquity) was just released a short while back that looks great as well, so lots of things to play around with!
I came here bc I wondered if it was possible to, rather than circuit-bend, program new words into to the classic TI Speak and Spell.. So, this is the first step on my learning path..👍
In my TI user club there was one person who owned the speech synthesizer. We spent the hour making it cuss till the adults made us stop. An that was as far as the kids where interested in it. We wanted memory expanders and disk drives to write games with. Having them talk was the least of our interests.
I was in the same situation in 1981. The Trash 80 was about four times the price right out of the box. The TI wasn’t a cheap PC, it was a game console that could be used to learn programming. Best of both worlds. The memory box was the best add on but it really wasn’t marketed well.
Lol! When I was a kid they had a TI-99/4A with speech synthesizer at Chucky Cheese. You'd enter text, and an animated "Chucky" would say it. If you tried to type a bad word, it would say, "Chucky will not say that word!" But didn't take us long to find a basic loophole. Essentially we'd just misspell the word... So for the F word we would spell it with a "Ph" in front of the "uck", and Chucky was swearing like a sailor in no time! Sure enough we were all laughing and giggling in hysterics, until a parent came by and made us stop!
I remember in the mid to late 80's a friend of mine interfaced a speak and spell with his home 8bit computer. I think it was a C64. He was proud to showcase his achievement.
In spite of the popularity and power of the C64, I clung to my TI because of the power of the Speech Synthesizer. I never knew you could inflect Text to Speech!
It might be hard to hear it from the samples, but LPC playback is much more playback of digitized input than it is true speech synthesis. Real audio is analyzed and broken down into LPC components. For example, the female voice you hear in Parsec is a real person, Aubree Anderson, who was a college student at the time. She provided all of the audio samples for input. Based on that, it actually has more similarities than differences with Mozer's process for the audio in c64 Ghostbusters.
Hi Jim, thanks for sharing your insights - always a wealth of information! Any idea how the Parsec developer had access to the necessary tools to create the LPC data from samples? It seems like it would be a highly specialized process at that time.
@@retrobitstv It was usually a paid service provided by Texas Instruments, using software they developed. Analysis was too heavy for personal computers at the time, and required mainframes. For the TI 99/4a games, though, I believe they provided the service for free, to support the product line. But other devices, like talking cars from auto manufacturers, had to pay.
This was my first computer! I can't believe I never tried to search for it before. Very nostalgic! I had the speech synthesizer as well! I learned basic when I was young. My upgrade was a Tandy 1000 with a cassette drive lol. Ever spend hours typing basic code and losing it. Kids nowadays have no clue lol
Wow, the memories! I remember the little fish moving while learning additions! I also remember the speech synthesizer pronouncing "8" like "eighhhfff"! It made us laugh so hard! Also, I have been told by my older brother (I was about 4 at the time, and he was 9) that we (kids!) found a way to program French sounds, so that the speech synthesizer would pronounce somewhat French sentences. It was probably pretty basic, but still impressive for the time.
I put the speech synth inside my Ti99. It fits on top of the shielding metal, the connections are made with wires to via's (small holes in the traces) next to the contacts of the side connector on the main board. This way the side connector says free for other use.
Glad you liked it! Yes, I rented a race-prepped e36 at the 'ring in September of 2019 and was able to check that off my bucket list. Such an amazing place!
I was one that had Ti994a BBS who wrote Sofeware For Caltex 99 Bulletin Board that used the Perfrefal box with rs232 card , 32k card and 720mb disk drive. A modem at 300 baud with advance software for the modem. The BBS. Had message board, download , upload and Speech. 1982-1989. Still have 3 TI994a computer but keyboards stop working .
I once saw a project to build a similar device for the C64 in one of the magazines. I initially wanted to build it (despite a complete lack of electronics knowledge), but never did, mostly because there wouldn't be any software to take advantage of it. I did use a program called S.A.M. to write a couple BASIC programs that spoke though. There's at least one C64 game that plays sampled speech and sound effects without freezing everything else. It's called Slimey's Mine. Granted, the speech isn't especially long, but it's impressive that it plays perfectly without affecting the rest of the game, and the quality is even pretty good. Microsurgeon - I loved this on the Intellivision. I've tried the TI version in emulators and it doesn't appeal to me as much as I thought it would. It's nice to have the status on the screen all the time, but that also means that the actual playing area is smaller.
We had a speech synthesizer when I was in the 8th grade. My dad and I wrote a spelling practice program that would allow you to enter words, save them to tape, and then it would call out the words in random order and tell you whether you spelled them correctly or not. It worked pretty well. I got A's in spelling from that point on. It did mispronounce some words. Mosquito was pronounced mos-kqit-oh. lol
Haha that's great! A good use for the technology for sure. Yea, in my testing I had to intentionally misspell some words to get it to pronounce them correctly :P
@@retrobitstv If I were to modify that program today I would add the option of an alternate pronunciation. Ah well... Almost 40 years of hindsight is 20/20. (Holy crap, it's been that long ago??)
Unfortunately you missed one of the best early examples of the speech synth IMHO - making it sing Daisy. Thanks to cold weather in Colorado and a lab full of TI-99/4s (and then 4As) with toasty linear power supplies, I'd sneak into it at lunch and learn, leading to a good career in IT. I begged my parents to buy one, and then received the free speech module, added the expansion box, floppy drives (SSSD, then DSSD, then DSDD, then DSQD), then a RAM drive, and then increased the internal memory and doubled the speed. Awesome machine design with expansion cards that just worked without the need of extra driver software!
Nice to see the Bad Obsession Motorsport mug there ... Did enjoy my TI-99/4A and of course I had the speech synthesiser for use with Parsec ... god the official TI joysticks were hatefull though!
Haha too true! We had those original TI joysticks back in the day. Whoever designed them (especially the fire button) must not have ever played a video game before!
I believe the Speech Synthesizer had a lot to do with why my friends who had Atari 800 and C64 thought my TI994a was so cool. Of course it got even better when 3rd party games were being made. Imagics best port of Microsurgeon was mind-blowing on the TI. Speech just really wasn't a thing in video games until the next decade. It was rare.
Nice job, Matt! Sounds better than I would have thought. Cool that it actually had [game] software support. 10:07 lol, "It's Operation, the wacky doctors game!" 15:52 The later C64 Hearsay 1000 had the allophone mechanism too but had to stumble along, largely only being able to read text from the screen which slowed gameplay (even in text adventures). By comparison, Mikes Retro Tech showed off the Toshiba speech chip-powered Commodore Magic Voice Cartridge, also with a ROM dictionary, but as you say that's from years later than this TI one.
Thanks! Yea, for a system that had a pretty small software library all told, the number of titles supporting speech was pretty decent. I had to omit a bunch of captures I recorded in the interest in time too! I know a lot of later systems got various speech enhancements, but I wonder if any of them were as well-supported as the TI's. Maybe when expressed as a percentage of the total library :P
Haha true! When I raided my bin, I found that length of red wire already cut so I used it :) I do not plan to power anything other than the RAM expansion with it!
Yeah, I don’t remember how many amps every the console draws in the built in PSU but I think that’s why they didn’t run the jumper at the factory - the 32K external RAM he is using barely draws anything, but TI might have been afraid of something else drawing too much current.
I ordered one of these Cash On Delivery back in 1984. I didn't have the discipline to save enough money from my Confirmation party. When the delivery guy came, he had the package in his hand, but I didn't have enough money. Back in the truck it went, and I learned a lesson about saving money. Good times, lol!!
If Texas Instruments tried a little harder and had better research and marketing, we would have TI machines at home, not ''IBM PCs'' and Gates MS software.
'One time me and three friends dropped acid and drove around in my dad’s car. He has one of those talking cars, we’re tripping, and the car goes, “The door is ajar.” We pulled over and thought about that for 12 hours. “How can a door be a jar?” … “Why would they put a jar on a car?” … “Oh man, the freeway’s melting!” … “Put it in the jar.”' - Bill Hicks
I had one back in the day, but I leaned more towards my VIC 20, just because it had more support. But I also had an Atari 800 and still leaned towards the VIC 20 for programming, despite BASIC 2.0 being rather limited. It came down to the Petascii character set, which gave the Commodore "graphics" with just print statements.
So I just got my Speech Synth for my TI-99/4a today. I'm quite new to the 99 and am wondering, is there ANY way to get output from it, if all I have is the base computer and the speech synth? (No command modules yet)
I believe you need either the TI Extended Basic cartridge of the Terminal Emulator 2 to access high level speed routines, otherwise you'll probably have to access the low level hardware directly. I would check out the Flashrom99 or FinalGrom products which will give you access to most of the system's cartridge library on an SDcard.
I had one of these back when I was a kid. It was a novelty and I made it say farts a lot. I always wondered what the door was for... Nothing! mystery solved.
In theory the ti99 could produce out of it’s own but at the cost of all soundchannels but it still would had power left for other stuff since it’s cpu is 16bit.
I only have info for some. One came from "99'er Magazine", Volume 1, No. 4. The Microwave ad came from "ELECTRONICS Australia", April 1980. Also, "BYTE", September 1981. They were all found on archive.org.
I believe I picked this one up on the VCF forum or Atariage for 20 or 30 bucks. You're right, I just checked and the eBay prices are all over the place!
Some guy just gave me a complete TI-99/4A setup with synthesizer, PEB and all the cards plus a ton of cartridges. The games for the most part are horrible, but once I plugged in the synthesizer they became hilarious! I had a Radio Shack Color Computer (the silver one) back in 1981 and I thought it was a pretty good computer at the time, but now I believe the TI was actually much more advanced. Would like to see a head-to-head comparison.
Nice, I'd like to pick up a PEB at some point but they are so bulky! Some of the best games on the TI were unlicensed titles from AtariSoft and Parker Bros. Moon Patrol, Popeye, Pole Position, stuff like that come to mind.
@@retrobitstv I think the PEB weighs 40lbs! I have it standing on end, and it looks like a 90's PC tower. It has the most ridiculously over-engineered cable I have ever seen.
I've been trying to find a list of all the non-educational speech-synth games, but no luck, so I started a list. Here's what I have so far. A proper list probably needs to distinguish between cartridge / non-cartridge as well. Alpiner Bigfoot Buck Rogers - Planet of Zoom Championship Baseball Fathom Lasso M*A*S*H Meteor Belt Microsurgeon Moon Mine Parsec Princess & Frog Pulsar Secret Agent Sewermania Space Bandits Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator Super Astrosmash (Super) Demon Attack Superfly TI Trek Wing War
Mobygames has an incomplete list of TI games that support speech so once you have completed your research you may want to update their data as the canonical list for such things! www.mobygames.com/game/attribute:575/platform:ti-994a/sort:moby_score/page:1/
When I was at TI and the decision was made to discontinue the 99/4A the joke was that they had found the right price for it. $10 less than it cost to make.
Okay, tried this out and PC99W does in fact play back allophones, but not without some tinkering with the code to slow it down. (I'm running PC99w on a Ryzen 3 which it isn't optimized for: 10 OPEN #1:"SPEECH", OUTPUT 20 PRINT #1:"THIS IS THE T I 99 HOME COMPUTER" 23 FOR I=1 TO 1500 25 NEXT I 30 PRINT #1:"RUNNING ON P C 99 USING ALLOPHONES FROM" 33 FOR I=1 TO 1500 35 NEXT I 40 PRINT #1:"THE TERMINAL EMULATOR CARTRIDGE" 43 FOR I=1 TO 1500 45 NEXT I 50 CLOSE #1
I could make it imitate a drum beat by using strings of consonants and spaces for rests. "TPK TPK TP TPK TPK TP", etc. I wish I'd heard/thought that pass-thru power fix, I'd have left the speech synth connected more often.
@@retrobitstv One of my cats steals discs right out of drive. Then he runs off with them. There is a video on my channel haha. If I open a drive and he is anywhere in the house he comes running and activates "attack mode".
It's not technically necessary to many programs so I'd say the hardware cost probably held speech back on all platforms. The lack of full allophone support till much later didn't help either since the whole "full word" expansion model was just cumbersome enough to be a hindrance. Speak & Spell made it work but it was much cheaper overall. Any peripheral not supported enough will always fall into obscurity, despite a pretty good amount of games there it was a luxury novelty, maybe if every program used the module it could have sold better. Partial or optional use tends to turn into low amount of use, while KITT and HAL talked as a stock feature lol. I think with education software that was probably the easiest thing to add speech too while good use in video games took some design skill to make sure it didn't get annoying and unwelcome.
The 4A outputs RF and composite video so basically any old TV or 15kHz monitor should work fine. If you can find one, the F18a upgrade gives your TI VGA output and enhanced graphics modes.
I had one of these with the speech synth when I was six. I thought it was super cool, but I spent more time on the games (inc. Parsec) and learning BASIC than the educational games. They felt so basic and boring after the first play through.
I'm the person that ported the TI-99/4A to the MiSTer FPGA. I didn't realize allophones didn't work until watching your video. I've just committed a fix, and it will show up in the next release. FYI, I took the actual LPC conversion code from FPGA code written by DAR, which is based on MAME, but should be fairly accurate to the actual device. I added the rest of the synth logic (speech rom handling, interface, etc). There is room for improvement, but the behavior should be fairly close. This is all being done in the FPGA. The reason it didn't work was that the speech synthesizer has a "not ready" signal that can disable the CPU when it's FIFO buffer is full. Apparently, the Terminal Emulator 2 cart, just sends the data as quickly as it can, and that can overflow the buffer, so stalling the CPU is necessary. After seeing your video, it only took me 15 minutes to hook up the signal (and a couple hours to compile and test), and it started working.
Very cool, thank you for your work on the 4A core and for identifying and resolving the TE2 issue! I will be sure to test it out when the next release ships. Cool you were able to diagnose it so easily and wish I had those skills :)
from memory there was only 255 allophones accessible via TE2 ...
Honestly ... my car Door is NOT a Jar ! :-D
I'm glad somebody is doing emulation for the TI. I thought about getting a Mister eventually. Right now I use a cheap android box or hook up a laptop on my arcade kiosk I put together.
I think that the TI gets forgotten about, so I really enjoyed this video. It was a pretty popular machine for a while in the early 80s. When I was nine, we had the TI running on a color TV and a cassette player/recorder. Another family was nice enough to let us borrow their speech synthesizer for a few days. I was blown away by Alpiner with speech. I remember typing CALL SAY a lot. That might have been in Extended Basic. It was a different feeling using a home computer back then. We felt like we were directly accessing the machine, instead of it being a magic box that it feels like today.
The 99 was my first computer, and I loved it. I still do, and I'm slowly putting my old setup back together, thanks to eBay.
Good luck finding everything! There are some cool new products for the system as well such as the FinalGrom cart, TIPI, and NanoPEB that I've been meaning to try out. A new RPG (Realms of Antiquity) was just released a short while back that looks great as well, so lots of things to play around with!
I came here bc I wondered if it was possible to, rather than circuit-bend, program new words into to the classic TI Speak and Spell..
So, this is the first step on my learning path..👍
In my TI user club there was one person who owned the speech synthesizer. We spent the hour making it cuss till the adults made us stop. An that was as far as the kids where interested in it. We wanted memory expanders and disk drives to write games with. Having them talk was the least of our interests.
I was in the same situation in 1981. The Trash 80 was about four times the price right out of the box. The TI wasn’t a cheap PC, it was a game console that could be used to learn programming. Best of both worlds. The memory box was the best add on but it really wasn’t marketed well.
Lol! When I was a kid they had a TI-99/4A with speech synthesizer at Chucky Cheese. You'd enter text, and an animated "Chucky" would say it. If you tried to type a bad word, it would say, "Chucky will not say that word!" But didn't take us long to find a basic loophole. Essentially we'd just misspell the word... So for the F word we would spell it with a "Ph" in front of the "uck", and Chucky was swearing like a sailor in no time! Sure enough we were all laughing and giggling in hysterics, until a parent came by and made us stop!
I am so happy to own one of these gems.
I remember in the mid to late 80's a friend of mine interfaced a speak and spell with his home 8bit computer. I think it was a C64. He was proud to showcase his achievement.
I did my 8th grade science fair project on speech synthesis using this thing. Great memories! I played soooo much Parsec back in the day! 😄
In spite of the popularity and power of the C64, I clung to my TI because of the power of the Speech Synthesizer.
I never knew you could inflect Text to Speech!
It might be hard to hear it from the samples, but LPC playback is much more playback of digitized input than it is true speech synthesis. Real audio is analyzed and broken down into LPC components. For example, the female voice you hear in Parsec is a real person, Aubree Anderson, who was a college student at the time. She provided all of the audio samples for input.
Based on that, it actually has more similarities than differences with Mozer's process for the audio in c64 Ghostbusters.
Hi Jim, thanks for sharing your insights - always a wealth of information! Any idea how the Parsec developer had access to the necessary tools to create the LPC data from samples? It seems like it would be a highly specialized process at that time.
@@retrobitstv It was usually a paid service provided by Texas Instruments, using software they developed. Analysis was too heavy for personal computers at the time, and required mainframes. For the TI 99/4a games, though, I believe they provided the service for free, to support the product line. But other devices, like talking cars from auto manufacturers, had to pay.
@@JimLeonard Very cool info, thanks!
This was my first computer! I can't believe I never tried to search for it before. Very nostalgic! I had the speech synthesizer as well! I learned basic when I was young. My upgrade was a Tandy 1000 with a cassette drive lol. Ever spend hours typing basic code and losing it. Kids nowadays have no clue lol
I'd like to think that the speech synthesizer was the first "soundcard" I ever owned, way before the Ad-Lib, the Lapc-1, or a Soundblaster 32 AWE.
Wow, the memories!
I remember the little fish moving while learning additions! I also remember the speech synthesizer pronouncing "8" like "eighhhfff"! It made us laugh so hard!
Also, I have been told by my older brother (I was about 4 at the time, and he was 9) that we (kids!) found a way to program French sounds, so that the speech synthesizer would pronounce somewhat French sentences. It was probably pretty basic, but still impressive for the time.
I put the speech synth inside my Ti99. It fits on top of the shielding metal, the connections are made with wires to via's (small holes in the traces) next to the contacts of the side connector on the main board. This way the side connector says free for other use.
Great idea!
Very cool, I had a 99/4A and the speech synth. Some of those old games bring back the memories. Whew.
Very informative and entertaining video! since I was at the Nürburgring last weekend, I wonder if the cap is from there? 🤔
Glad you liked it! Yes, I rented a race-prepped e36 at the 'ring in September of 2019 and was able to check that off my bucket list. Such an amazing place!
@@retrobitstv I want to go back!
Well done! Lots of great information, and superb demonstration.
Thanks for your feedback and support!
I was one that had Ti994a BBS who wrote Sofeware For Caltex 99 Bulletin Board that used the Perfrefal box with rs232 card , 32k card and 720mb disk drive. A modem at 300 baud with advance software for the modem. The BBS. Had message board, download , upload and Speech. 1982-1989. Still have 3 TI994a computer but keyboards stop working .
I once saw a project to build a similar device for the C64 in one of the magazines. I initially wanted to build it (despite a complete lack of electronics knowledge), but never did, mostly because there wouldn't be any software to take advantage of it. I did use a program called S.A.M. to write a couple BASIC programs that spoke though.
There's at least one C64 game that plays sampled speech and sound effects without freezing everything else. It's called Slimey's Mine. Granted, the speech isn't especially long, but it's impressive that it plays perfectly without affecting the rest of the game, and the quality is even pretty good.
Microsurgeon - I loved this on the Intellivision. I've tried the TI version in emulators and it doesn't appeal to me as much as I thought it would. It's nice to have the status on the screen all the time, but that also means that the actual playing area is smaller.
We had a speech synthesizer when I was in the 8th grade. My dad and I wrote a spelling practice program that would allow you to enter words, save them to tape, and then it would call out the words in random order and tell you whether you spelled them correctly or not. It worked pretty well. I got A's in spelling from that point on.
It did mispronounce some words. Mosquito was pronounced mos-kqit-oh. lol
Haha that's great! A good use for the technology for sure. Yea, in my testing I had to intentionally misspell some words to get it to pronounce them correctly :P
@@retrobitstv If I were to modify that program today I would add the option of an alternate pronunciation. Ah well... Almost 40 years of hindsight is 20/20. (Holy crap, it's been that long ago??)
I had one with the speech synth. It was cool I was a pro at Parsec. I also programmed in the entire Desiderata and it was awesome.
Unfortunately you missed one of the best early examples of the speech synth IMHO - making it sing Daisy. Thanks to cold weather in Colorado and a lab full of TI-99/4s (and then 4As) with toasty linear power supplies, I'd sneak into it at lunch and learn, leading to a good career in IT. I begged my parents to buy one, and then received the free speech module, added the expansion box, floppy drives (SSSD, then DSSD, then DSDD, then DSQD), then a RAM drive, and then increased the internal memory and doubled the speed. Awesome machine design with expansion cards that just worked without the need of extra driver software!
Wow just found this piece and the phone for 7 dollars at a thrift shop. Thanks for the cool video
Great deal!
Nice to see the Bad Obsession Motorsport mug there ...
Did enjoy my TI-99/4A and of course I had the speech synthesiser for use with Parsec ... god the official TI joysticks were hatefull though!
Haha too true! We had those original TI joysticks back in the day. Whoever designed them (especially the fire button) must not have ever played a video game before!
Cool video
I loved Microsurgeon on the Intellivision. I believe it had speech capability too with the add-on synthesizer (which I did not have).
I believe the Speech Synthesizer had a lot to do with why my friends who had Atari 800 and C64 thought my TI994a was so cool. Of course it got even better when 3rd party games were being made. Imagics best port of Microsurgeon was mind-blowing on the TI.
Speech just really wasn't a thing in video games until the next decade. It was rare.
Nice job, Matt! Sounds better than I would have thought. Cool that it actually had [game] software support.
10:07 lol, "It's Operation, the wacky doctors game!"
15:52 The later C64 Hearsay 1000 had the allophone mechanism too but had to stumble along, largely only being able to read text from the screen which slowed gameplay (even in text adventures).
By comparison, Mikes Retro Tech showed off the Toshiba speech chip-powered Commodore Magic Voice Cartridge, also with a ROM dictionary, but as you say that's from years later than this TI one.
Thanks! Yea, for a system that had a pretty small software library all told, the number of titles supporting speech was pretty decent. I had to omit a bunch of captures I recorded in the interest in time too! I know a lot of later systems got various speech enhancements, but I wonder if any of them were as well-supported as the TI's. Maybe when expressed as a percentage of the total library :P
Great job! Love it!
5:45 Soo... How many amps are you expecting, because that's a pretty beefy jumper wire.
Haha true! When I raided my bin, I found that length of red wire already cut so I used it :) I do not plan to power anything other than the RAM expansion with it!
Yeah, I don’t remember how many amps every the console draws in the built in PSU but I think that’s why they didn’t run the jumper at the factory - the 32K external RAM he is using barely draws anything, but TI might have been afraid of something else drawing too much current.
Kitt's voicebox was in the center console, not in front of the steering wheel on the instrument cluster. Mandela Effect.
I ordered one of these Cash On Delivery back in 1984. I didn't have the discipline to save enough money from my Confirmation party. When the delivery guy came, he had the package in his hand, but I didn't have enough money. Back in the truck it went, and I learned a lesson about saving money. Good times, lol!!
Oh man, that simulated voice really takes you back.
If Texas Instruments tried a little harder and had better research and marketing, we would have TI machines at home, not ''IBM PCs'' and Gates MS software.
A door is a jar? Oh yeah? Then let's see you fill it with jam or pickles!
'One time me and three friends dropped acid and drove around in my dad’s car. He has one of those talking cars, we’re tripping, and the car goes, “The door is ajar.” We pulled over and thought about that for 12 hours. “How can a door be a jar?” … “Why would they put a jar on a car?” … “Oh man, the freeway’s melting!” … “Put it in the jar.”' - Bill Hicks
My grandpa had that car - his version of this joke was "No it's not, it's a door!"
@@whaaaa869 It's an ancient joke really. Goes back to long before Mr. Hicks used it. But the LSD part is rather hilarious. xD
I had one back in the day, but I leaned more towards my VIC 20, just because it had more support. But I also had an Atari 800 and still leaned towards the VIC 20 for programming, despite BASIC 2.0 being rather limited. It came down to the Petascii character set, which gave the Commodore "graphics" with just print statements.
So I just got my Speech Synth for my TI-99/4a today. I'm quite new to the 99 and am wondering, is there ANY way to get output from it, if all I have is the base computer and the speech synth? (No command modules yet)
I believe you need either the TI Extended Basic cartridge of the Terminal Emulator 2 to access high level speed routines, otherwise you'll probably have to access the low level hardware directly. I would check out the Flashrom99 or FinalGrom products which will give you access to most of the system's cartridge library on an SDcard.
NICE Intro speech ! :-)
I had one of these back when I was a kid. It was a novelty and I made it say farts a lot. I always wondered what the door was for... Nothing! mystery solved.
It's also great for hiding small objects!
In theory the ti99 could produce out of it’s own but at the cost of all soundchannels but it still would had power left for other stuff since it’s cpu is 16bit.
Do you have a link to the magazines shown in this video?
I only have info for some. One came from "99'er Magazine", Volume 1, No. 4. The Microwave ad came from "ELECTRONICS Australia", April 1980. Also, "BYTE", September 1981. They were all found on archive.org.
@@retrobitstv The "99'er Magazine Volume 1 No. 4" was what I was looking for, thanks.
Excellent video. At that time, did not have the money to have one of these and nowadays, well, pricing is still crazy on eBay.
Yeah, don’t ask me why but speech synth prices have gone batty. I used to pick these up for free or $5 or so.
I believe I picked this one up on the VCF forum or Atariage for 20 or 30 bucks. You're right, I just checked and the eBay prices are all over the place!
Some guy just gave me a complete TI-99/4A setup with synthesizer, PEB and all the cards plus a ton of cartridges. The games for the most part are horrible, but once I plugged in the synthesizer they became hilarious! I had a Radio Shack Color Computer (the silver one) back in 1981 and I thought it was a pretty good computer at the time, but now I believe the TI was actually much more advanced. Would like to see a head-to-head comparison.
Nice, I'd like to pick up a PEB at some point but they are so bulky! Some of the best games on the TI were unlicensed titles from AtariSoft and Parker Bros. Moon Patrol, Popeye, Pole Position, stuff like that come to mind.
@@retrobitstv I think the PEB weighs 40lbs! I have it standing on end, and it looks like a 90's PC tower. It has the most ridiculously over-engineered cable I have ever seen.
I've been trying to find a list of all the non-educational speech-synth games, but no luck, so I started a list. Here's what I have so far. A proper list probably needs to distinguish between cartridge / non-cartridge as well. Alpiner
Bigfoot
Buck Rogers - Planet of Zoom
Championship Baseball
Fathom
Lasso
M*A*S*H
Meteor Belt
Microsurgeon
Moon Mine
Parsec
Princess & Frog
Pulsar
Secret Agent
Sewermania
Space Bandits
Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator
Super Astrosmash
(Super) Demon Attack
Superfly
TI Trek
Wing War
Mobygames has an incomplete list of TI games that support speech so once you have completed your research you may want to update their data as the canonical list for such things!
www.mobygames.com/game/attribute:575/platform:ti-994a/sort:moby_score/page:1/
When I was at TI and the decision was made to discontinue the 99/4A the joke was that they had found the right price for it. $10 less than it cost to make.
Haha, must have been really interesting times to be in that industry!
Wonder whether PC99 can do the allophone speech. I'll try to remember to give it whirl tonight when i get onto windows.
Okay, tried this out and PC99W does in fact play back allophones, but not without some tinkering with the code to slow it down. (I'm running PC99w on a Ryzen 3 which it isn't optimized for:
10 OPEN #1:"SPEECH", OUTPUT
20 PRINT #1:"THIS IS THE T I 99 HOME COMPUTER"
23 FOR I=1 TO 1500
25 NEXT I
30 PRINT #1:"RUNNING ON P C 99 USING ALLOPHONES FROM"
33 FOR I=1 TO 1500
35 NEXT I
40 PRINT #1:"THE TERMINAL EMULATOR CARTRIDGE"
43 FOR I=1 TO 1500
45 NEXT I
50 CLOSE #1
I could make it imitate a drum beat by using strings of consonants and spaces for rests. "TPK TPK TP TPK TPK TP", etc.
I wish I'd heard/thought that pass-thru power fix, I'd have left the speech synth connected more often.
i remember typing gibberish and repeated letters mmmmmrrrr and it sounded hilarious!!
Subscribed because you are a computer nerd who also races cars like I do. :)
Welcome! I also have cats :)
@@retrobitstv One of my cats steals discs right out of drive. Then he runs off with them. There is a video on my channel haha. If I open a drive and he is anywhere in the house he comes running and activates "attack mode".
@@CarsandCats Haha now that's a new one to me! My cat just sleeps in the bed all day and can't be bothered with what I'm doing :P
It's not technically necessary to many programs so I'd say the hardware cost probably held speech back on all platforms. The lack of full allophone support till much later didn't help either since the whole "full word" expansion model was just cumbersome enough to be a hindrance. Speak & Spell made it work but it was much cheaper overall.
Any peripheral not supported enough will always fall into obscurity, despite a pretty good amount of games there it was a luxury novelty, maybe if every program used the module it could have sold better. Partial or optional use tends to turn into low amount of use, while KITT and HAL talked as a stock feature lol.
I think with education software that was probably the easiest thing to add speech too while good use in video games took some design skill to make sure it didn't get annoying and unwelcome.
I use it on js99'er emulation
Ever been to the Ring?
I got to check it off my bucket list right before the pandemic started! retrobits.tv/nurburgring.jpg
what type of tv/monitor would be best to hook one of these computers up to?
The 4A outputs RF and composite video so basically any old TV or 15kHz monitor should work fine. If you can find one, the F18a upgrade gives your TI VGA output and enhanced graphics modes.
I had one of these with the speech synth when I was six. I thought it was super cool, but I spent more time on the games (inc. Parsec) and learning BASIC than the educational games. They felt so basic and boring after the first play through.
Where's my rocket lawn chair?
On the Neo Geo probably :P
Make it say "Part"
The pizza is a jar.
Cool accent ;)