LGR Oddware - Digispeech Plus: Sound Blaster Over Parallel
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- Опубліковано 22 кві 2021
- Sound Blaster over the parallel port?! YEP. This one's all about the DSP Solutions Digispeech Plus, a sound device for DOS and Windows PCs that connects via the parallel port. It's not restricted to simple OPL2/3 stuff, nor is it a Covox Speech Thing/DSS clone. The DS311 simply plugs in, runs a TSR, and lets you select Sound Blaster mode in classic computer games using nothing more than the humble printer port. Fantastic.
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Here's an archive of the Digispeech disks:
archive.org/details/digispeec...
● Check out VWestlife's video on the Portable Sound Plus:
• Oddware: Portable Soun...
● Music licensed from:
www.epidemicsound.com
#LGR #Retro #Technology - Наука та технологія
That ending jingle made me feel like I was going to learn all about my changing body.
I was just waiting for:
“Thank you for holding. Your call is important to us, and a representative will be with your shortly.”
captain america.
your body is a mysterious place ...
A zillow house tour on youtube
Reminds me of the dentist office when I was a kid.
lmfao what a great way to describe it
The way you got the reflections in the screen is a PERFECT way to show us DOS stuff. You can look at us and gesticulate while we can still look at a nice beige box.
i came to comments exactly to praise this frame. beautiful!
@@RafaelHefferCavaletti +1
Honestly yes, GENIUS camerawork!
Yeah, this setup looks great.
This needs to be a new thing
11:48 Framing in the reflection of the monitor was a really nice touch, well done sir.
i was going to say the same thing so SERIOUS look to his face lol
Such a nostalgic camera angle!
That's actually one of his Christmas clones.
“I think I’ll let it speak for itself.”
Woah, Clint! Went all Steve Jobs on us there. 😂
That demo music is so 90's cheesy that I cry tears made of nostalgia.
Checkout the Korg Wavestation SR Demo Song video. I've posted a link to it twice now and YT keeps removing.
It sounds like BGM to a drug commercial: "Side effects of taking LGR may include..." Or possibly the hold music of a call center: "Thank you for calling LGR technical support. Your call is important to us."
@@Croz89 Or something ripped straight off The Weather Channel.
Is it really necessary to call anything that's less than subtle/subdued "cheesy"?
@@6581punk Most likely made with one of those!
My dad had one of these in our attic, never had any clue what it was for.
DAAADDDDDDDD!
@@livefreeprintguns ok
Can I buy it? If you still have it...
I mentioned this before, but again: Thanks for having awesome subtitles, sometimes even with additional jokes and very good/funny descriptions of the sounds that are going on!
They're great.
Yes, thank you Clint. I am currently watching next to a sleeping baby.
@@icedstev0433 me too!
As someone who is deaf, I appreciate the subtitles so much, although there are earlier Oddware episodes that do not have captions at all, and so sadly, I had to skip those.
I have yet to find another channel that does subtitles as well as or close to the way that Clint does it.
They made scanners around that time that would allow you to put a book on the scanner and you could click a button for it to read the book back to you. Was for the blind. You had to flip the page when it was done. It was a basic bed scanner with a text to speech built in.
Sometimes the past seems futuristic.
@@borjesvensson8661 like when you could go outside and meet people face to face. Man, that was so futuristic
wow that's actually pretty cool.
I've seen those and would love to have access to one. I am an audible learner so I like having text to speech but I also like the idea of owning physical copies of materials. The idea too of a dedicated device rather than having to have a computer with software loaded up such as in the case of Kurzweil seems useful to me. Sadly, when you do find one on eBay etc. They are really expensive.
Huh, that's pretty cool. Definitely helpful for the blind.
I appreciate the English subtitles. it's a huge help to be able watch this at work without bothering coworkers
"All you had to do is to do some of your damn job, TP!!"
Fuck them blast that shit
You’re watching a video about a parallel port sound device... without sound?
Aren't those simply auto generated by youtube? AI stuff?
@@RidleyMMA these are two separate things. Clint adds one made one by himself.
Never saw someone playing Wolf3D looking so consentrated 😅
Killin' nazis is serious business
after all, Clint is the guy who has tried Wolf3D first at his Logitech G502 mouse review.
@@LGR I literally have notifications turned on for your channel and I had to go to your channel to find out that you uploaded this.
Hey lgr.
This is more of with the IBM software sort of with the educational stuff but sort of not.
It's more of for the sound Hardware that was compatible with their educational software for speech output.
I had the original version of dragon dictate!
The sound card it included yes the software included the card as well as a Shure headset!
Think I still may have the headset somewhere I may actually use that still it's a good one!
But the SIM card that was included was originally only use for the IBM educational software for speech and all that.
Except drug-addicted used it for for input only.
At least the version I had could not read back.
I think it was a version that could actually speak back to the person using it!
This was a very long time ago!
Main reason I used it is I had difficulty typing to the point that it was not foreseeable to do touch typing!
I'm glad that voice recognition came out when it did.
That was a blessing to be able to have!
Instead of somebody having to take dictation for me most of the time!
I still use Dragon somewhat but most of the time I'm using Google!
For something I use both because Google is better getting some things and dragon since it's just a larger vocabulary mainly.
And also since it will get just about almost anything although sometimes still less than desired outcomes as anyone would know!
Also I remember we actually got our first sound card in a RadioShack grab box.
The thing is the software was not included with it is how it wound up in the grab box.
But our sound tech at church was also a tech guy.
Brought over his laptop plugged in their phone line since he had modem!
That time we didn't even have a modem yet!
Use grappling after downloading the drivers for the sound card let there be sound!
He gave us a set of speakers is that we're just laying on the bench as he said!
"Overwhelmingly underwhelming" is terrific phrase
You get better at narrating every video- I always thing "there's no way he can top this one" And you always top it!! Not trying to raise your own expectations of yourself you do you!! Just know you are extremely loved and appreciated, and always will be!!
Thank you, always trying to improve!
I second that.
How neat, the town of Ephrata, WA hardly every gets acknowledgement locally, that mini clip of their high school was probably the most notoriety they'll ever get.
This brings back a lot of memories, my father was blind and he had one these speech synthesis things on his 386 computer. He also had a TSI Speech+ talking calculator that i played around with a lot, actually i think i have that calculator stored somewhere.
"DSP Solutions", my internet ruined brain immediately thought of Darksyde Phil lmfao
Sounds like a company that helps you get banned
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 And then pin the blame on you for getting banned.
At least they didn't make webcams.
Yep. My brain went there too.
[Crunchy digital voice] "Woooooooooooow...."
Love the note from Brandon. It comes complete with illustration. LMAO.
I haven't seen this kind of ancient technology for a while
yeah the comic strip at the end of note was awesome. Personal touch pre emoji ;)
I love that early 90s plastic look. The feel of the volume nob.
I like feeling nobs too.
@@Safetytrousers uhhh-huh-huh. hey Beavis. I said nob.
I appreciate you keeping in the part in Wolf3D where you try to go in the DoomII-only secret room lol
Nice to see more people noticed it ;)
Greetings, and welcome to a *sound-device thing.*
Hey Clint, is that Mary Poppins dialogue include as a test on the disk? My father in law is Richard M Sherman, who along with his brother wrote that as well as all the songs from that film as the Sherman Brothers. I'll for sure show him this vid, he will be tickled to know this exists!
Yep, Digispeech included it on the disk!
That is just a wild connection, from LGR to the Sherman Brothers--THE Disney songwriters.
Clint: "Say the words 'farts' and 'balls', DOSReader."
DOSReader: _"I'm sorry, Clint. I'm afraid I can't do that."_
It made up for it by making fart sounds trying to play Sim City with the wave and synth mixed
I could watch LGR videos in my sleep. The music is so calm and his voice is just so soothing.
The shot with your reflection in the monitor is pure kino.
Always happy to see/hear Epic Pinball. That game had such a damn good soundtrack.
Yep, it's definitely a big part of the reason I still go back and play it from time to time despite owning Pinball FX3 and gobs of tables.
Oh wow brings back memories of the early screen readers.... there’s some thing oddly satisfying though about the early synthesizer speech. As a blind person, made you feel like you were living in the space-age you could access the computer. I was like three, when I first learned how to use a computer with speech, it was awesome
LGR is a DOS Master. 11:49 - rockin' transparent text overlay with a full-motion video background of himself on a 486. Flawless execution!
no need for an inset window showing an LGR talking head - efficiency!
Stephen Hawking is a ****ing Quake master.
dude, it was just his reflection in the screen.... no video magic.... no DOS wizardry or transparent text programming... just a good old fashioned camera angle and great framing to make the himself appear to be on the screen... 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
@@Nobe_Oddy He knows.
@@Nobe_Oddy that's the joke
Back when I worked for Creative Labs in the 90s, we had a prototype of the "Port Blaster", a sound card for the parallel port designed for use in Laptops that back in those days didn't have integrated sound. They were almost ready to release when they made an embarrassing discovery: many laptop parallel ports didn't provide power. The whole project was scrapped.
Bet someone lost their job over that!
Seems like a silly reason to scrap something. Couldn't they have just added the option to run off batteries in that case?
@@alfo2804 I wish I knew the full story. I guess perhaps we'd already invested in manufacturing (plastic moulding tooling and PCBs), and run the product through certification (FCC, etc), and a redesign would cost more than projected profits.
OMFG!!!! 😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣 "Not a Happy Thought" HAHAHAAAA!!! That article was HILARIOUS!!! Thank you for this... it made my ENTIRE DAY!!! :D
We had a hundred of these in the 90s. It was big in the education space, hence the two headphone jacks for students to share the tutorial audio.
Canyon.mid tests... the wine tasting of 90s MIDI...
I kind of really loved the sounds from the Digispeech. I love that crunchy compressed sounding audio a lot. I would love to have crunchy Alex Trebek talk to me all day.
For a second I thought Clint's reflection at 18:25 was me in my own monitor and had a weird moment.
all nerdy people have the same Fashion skills, lol!
I had no idea anything like this existed, I would have killed to have Sound Blaster sound on an early 90s laptop.
Same, I had those tracker-like programs that could do multichannel over pc-speaker. Also actually amplified the wire at a time but it wasn't anything. I hated the office-world for that limitation. Like, a C64 had more interesting audio than the early PC's...
$150 would have been a problem at that age, though. :b
@@manuell3505 ive been trying to work out how a pc i had found thrown away had music from the pc speaker yet had no sound card.. Can you shed any light on how this is achieved?
@@Colt45hatchback Not exactly, but the beeper is basically an oscilator that can output a certain tone for a certain time on 1 channel. To generate something like speech, the "out time" has to be divided in multiple virtual channels. It's actually all sequential on 1 line but it sounds like complex audio.
I don't remember any names but there were DOS programs that could play 4-channel mod files. Because of that time-sharing it loses a lot of volume and sounds quite noisy.
@@Colt45hatchback there are some modulation tricks to make the pc speaker make richer sounds than it should rightly be able to.
@@LKRaider yeah i was only a kid at the time, but it had albeit distorted, essentially the same functionality as my other computer with a sound blaster, but it came from the pc speaker, didnt sound good, but to me it was awesome that it had music and fx in doom and jazz jackrabbit which were installed already when i picked it up from a hard waste pile in about 1999.
It's crazy how easy audio is implented into PCs now. Not too mention you can get dirt cheap interfaces for recording 24 bit instruments and mix and master tracks with professional tier VSTs that you can find everywhere for free.
DSP can do more than just digitize speech. It can also forget to turn off its webcam when it....
Oh, wait, wrong DSP.
Came to the comments specifically to see if someone made this one yet. Well played.
huahuahua...SNORT.
“Wow!” - DSP
LMAO 😹
"Oh the camera's on!"
I used this years ago when training the blind. I also used Artic Vision as well. I teach computers to the blind and visually impaired and this device brings back memories. I know on one client who still uses this device come to think of it
OMG that epic pinball and the SimCity.
Decades fly by!
Thank you for teaching us the history of the oddware alongside your thoughts on it. I really appreciate that I can learn about and watch an exploration of products that I would have never come across on my own.
Your channel teaches me more and more about technology and the ingenuity of the minds at work in those fields every video, and I love that so very much.
25:40 Love that crackly, bit-crushed lo-fi sound! Like a bad tape dub of a bad tape dub. Stays crunchy in milk. Part of a complete breakfast.
Clint's reflection while playing Wolf 3D will haunt my dreams. It looks like burn in.
If I'm not mistaken, I was in a speech therapy "thing" (not a class) and I would sit at a computer and do various speech "things" with one of these. It wasn't a part of the school system, some type of independent speech therapy place. I remember a small box just like this (probably this same one) that had volume controls, two headphone jacks so the instructor could listen with me, etc.
28:46 That tune has brought a smile to my face since I was a kid :-).
Speech was the holy grail for a long time. A friend of mine spent some serious money (for a kid) on a speech box for the ZX Spectrum. I remember how we were sitting in his basement trying to get that box to say something recognizable. Of course it wasn't as easy as to feed it a text and have it read it. No you had to write the text using phonetic notification which was a drag, but also kind of fun as we weren't really trying to get it to do anything useful.
Some years later I worked for ICL and we all had a ICL OPD on the desk. The OPD or One Per Desk was a Sinclair QL that ICL had packaged into a workstation / telephone. On top of the standard QL the phone / modem had been added and integrated using a ICL created UI so you could have a phone book, send messages to other OPD and have the OPD answering phone calls. You set up the answering function by entering a text that the OPD would read to whoever was calling. I'm not 100% sure but I think the speech synth was hardware based, and I seem to remember that if you wanted the message to be understandable you better pepper that text liberally with phonetics. But at the time we were chuffed it worked at all...
That Test music is perfect for some As seen on TV product advert.
16:13 I’m getting flashbacks to American Girl Premiere, “I have the sudden urge to fart on this chair... frrrrt” 😅
You channel has been a joy to follow through the pandemic (and before, obviously). Just wanted to thank you for all the hard work and *especially* for the efforts you've gone into documenting and preserving retro tech/software/etc.
Who needs a face cam when you have your monitor’s reflection!
I always look forward to Friday LGR. Now gimmi some digi
Did you notice, when you increased the recording quality to 22050Hz 16bit at 28:00 it completely ignored that and switched back to 11025Hz 3 Bit 28:16
just had to pause the video and scroll the comments for that. 22khz at 16bit would've sounded way better than that second try! oof.
I think that's because when it asked the standard 'Do you want to save the changes' question LGR clicked 'No', which is what made it revert back to the previous configuration.
@@doubleplayer6328 I know this is a 2 year old comment but it appears to be poor software coding. The dialog box seems to ask if you'd like to save changes to the old 'untitled' recording file. Instead it also seems to save or not save changes to the recording quality settings.
I remember someone trying to discuss having a modern soundblaster over parallel port made and there being bandwidth issues. Probably one of the reasons for the quirks of this thing.
I want to someday be as happy as Clint is listening to stock sample music on old computers.
Thank You LGR for beeing you
Don't let him bee himself, please
Assembled in indonesia? Never know indonesia has such an tech company back in the day (1990's) 😁
We had some big computer companies do their assembly in the early 90's here. My college professor used to work in Quantum hard drive plant in Batam.
I like your creative use of glare in the video. A+
They had some of these in the supply closet in my high school computer lab like three years ago lol
Should have asked if I could take a few
18:32 As long as we have old video games & wonky speech synthesizers, Alex’s charmingly pompous learnedness can live on forever 🥲
You could have played the Grabbag.mid to get a taste of how Duke Nukem 3D would have sounded. 🤓
Nice to see the Excalibur table from Epic Pinball make an appearance. Many years ago (early 2000s) I actually made an unofficial port of that table to Visual Pinball. Had to do some weird and slightly janky trickery to simulate the lightning effects, and it took quite a while to reverse engineer some of the table rules because I just wasn't very good at it. Excalibur and Crash and Burn had by far the best background music in that game.
No idea if my port version still exists anywhere on the Web, or if it would even still work if I tried it again.
I remember growing up, in Kindergarten (back in like 1995) we had these or those other models always attached to all our Win 3.1 computers in the lab! Was really cool at the time even though my old IBM had an mWave (yes, THAT mWave, still has it too, lol) with 2 stereo big speakers and sounded way better.
Holy crap, this thing looks just like the thing that was hooked up to our schools computer labs pcs in the mid 90s. I remember it doing voices for some ear safety game(?) we had to go through. Add set of those huge rubbery plastic and metal headphones i would of had a nostalgia overload.
Damnn this thing can do all the things, seems perfect for an old 386/486 laptop.
That comic at the bottom of the note is pure class.
I melted with nostalgia when you fired up Xargon. Thank you ❤️
Nice to see you here Tweeterman! :-)
@@BBC600 Hi!!
Just hopped on to YT in class and this was a treat to see. Guess the rest of class will be great.
I have to admit I'm partial to weird peripherals that attach via parallel, so this'll be a treat to watch.
I could only dream about cards like this when the only thing I could afford as a kid was Covox :) I remember I got some kind of Vortex card after that. Experiences like that: first time ever sound card, first time ever 3DFx card - those days are gone, it's not the same anymore. I guess we were lucky to live in days when internet and PCs were just growing up.
I can't believe NO ONE has mentioned the 'Network Disk" @ 12:12 - that was part of the NetAud system where each computer is linked together over a network and audio can be played to each of the computers (or each Digispeech DEVICE) to provide music, or announcements (in this case possible 'speaking' to anyone with this thing at the computer they are working on), or even recording audio at any of the computer/device locations -- at least this is what I could find on it - VERY INTERESTING!!! - I thought initially it was just for unattended installations of the Digispeech software on each computer in the "lab" but then I looked it up and I was blown away that this tech was around in 1991!!!!!
---- You NEED to do a video on this!!! DANG I wish I could get this to you to make sure you read it!! :( oh well, maybe luck will direct our fates to intertwine and you see this and smile anyhow :)
THANK FOR THEW GREAT VID!!! :D
Given how difficult it is to find MCA sound cards that work on IBM PS/2s, this sounds (no pun intended) like a perfect upgrade for such a system.
And can we all have appreciation for Clint's serious gaming face at around 21:00 in?
That article is absolutely hilarious...between the use of 'hitherto' and 'electronic mail' how could one *not* love it?? Its been shown by actual test. Lmao.
It was amazing how an interface that was intended to send characters to slow printers had so much bandwidth that it could support SCSI drives.
hmm, it couldn't... data transfer on everything that I used back in the day that used the parallel port, be it cameras, zip disk, scanners, whatever, the speed was glacially slow.... SCSI had nothing in common with paralell ports....
dude i love how well defined your reflection is while your playing about. it's like being able to see you talk and focus on what your doing. dunno if it was intentional, but it works really well
"Halt, Stop", "Ah Mein Leben" I have played this game to death in my youth.
That voice in the Digispeech reminds me of Dr. Sbaitso, which I am hoping to see a video someday.
It was made by the same company, it's just an updated version.
@@garry12gg The speech sounds like the Doubletalk speech synthesizer.
Dr. Sbaitso cured my mental illnesses
@@garry12gg This was made by DSP Solutions. Dr. Sbaitso was made by Creative Labs.
@@DracXBelmont The voice was made by the same company.
I had the DSP Plus way back but with no driver disk for years, I remember getting it from my aunt who worked for the school district. LOL I remember using it with a 9v battery snap-type battery clip to dc plug I mocked together as a portable speaker hooked up to the the Line In port with my Sony DISCMAN. I eventually became intrigued enough and searched around, and found the dgsetup online one day. I was happy to get it to work with a few games and 3.1 but very quickly removed it and its definitely sitting 20ft underground somewhere. RIP DSP!
the back drop with the purple and everything that's on the desk with it, i don't know how much is by design and intention but man it looks really pretty cool.
So this is what they used on Stargate Sg1! When Carter was inhabited by an alien 👾, they used this for speech
I'm so glad I wasn't the only person who noticed this!
Stargate SG1 is really a show of it's times. Like how they progress from CRTs to LCDs to Tablets throughout the shows lifetime.
woo just in time for lunch! I love the videos about 90s tech that i didn't know about because I was too poor and/or they weren't available in my country :)
I'm a trained CNA and when LGR said "I/O" I was thinking something totally different.
Keep up the quality videos!
The reflection shot in the monitor is as slick as the test track that follows. Well done, my dude.
The demo music BREEZE.WAV/.MID is from the composers at Passport Design. They seemed to have been the OEM go-to for that sort of stuff back in the early 90s.
OK, so it wasn't from Passport. From the RMI file: Easy does it with piano, guitar, and strings. Produced by Prosonus. Get it here: gekk.info/midis/PBellMM/BREEZE3.RMI
Wow 3 bit audio. That is absolutely nuts... I’m surprised those recordings sound as good as they do.
Right?
I love the shot with the reflection clint. Your becoming really talented with the camera. Also 👏 on the ambient ,never thought someone will nile the cool and warm vibe like you are doing lately .
Amazing! I had thought stuff like this was restricted to modern adlib parallel port projects. Cool to know that these things actually existed in the 90s too.
That demo music is one step to become robert downey jr version of every breath you take
The TTS that was used is an updated version of Smoothtalker, the same TTS used in Dr Sbaitso, Kid Works 2, Storybook Weaver and Opening Night.
That First Byte technology sure shows up in a lot of places, huh.
@@StereoTyp0 Yup.
Nostalgia hit me really hard at 28:53, when you moved the image on the monitor left-right by rotating a knob. Totally forgot that this was the way to do it, back in the day.
Just casually bouncing the picture around.
I remember kids messing with the knobs on the school computers, with the result that it would be way off-center, or the wrong size, or even a trapezoid.
I loved the DOS digi-speech little RAP. It could be a genre
Clever using the reflection of your monitor to keep yourself in shot while showing whats on the monitor.
Would have lost a bet if someone asked me if you can do SB over printer port.
I love that you're still rocking that same compaq from when I first subscribed all those years ago. I'd love to find one myself.
One of the few (literally) YTers that actually make Subtitles.
oohhh oddware, I missed you so so much
Ahh Finally! We have a DSP we can actually enjoy listening to... ;)
"Oh the camera's on!"
Love the sounds.. thanks dude. Keep it coming. Takes me back in the nicest way.
Catching up on my LGR backlog, and was really surprised to see Brandon as the guy loaning the Digispeech Plus! Super Fighter Team does some really awesome work, and it's extremely cool seeing this sort of support between members of the retro tech enthusiast community
Lol, it sounds like it's high
Shut up jesus
i think this man smokes weed
It's high
I am high and this thing sounds like it couldn’t possibly speak any slower
LoL Didn't expect to see you here😀🤘
I'm honestly surprised that it didn't come with a floppy with a free trial of audible included.
I was thinking that was one mighty sharp CRT video you got going there. Took me a while to realize it was a reflection. Such creative framing!
For some reason I just love the shots where you are visible on the black background of the screen. Just a good camera angle