TI-99/4A Speech Demo
Demo of the TI-99/4A talking. It's always been difficult to generate speech on the TI using the TI Speech Synth, because the synth chip uses LPC (linear predictive coding) to produce the tones and sounds. This demo was produced QBOX Pro (a very old piece of 16 bit Win 3.0 software). I recorded my voice as a WAV, down sampled, removed breathing noises, corrected BIAS, and processed using QBOX. QBOX gives you the data to fire at the synth chip. I then wrote a simple machine code program to do the talking and update the display. Enjoy. The TI-99/4A emulator you see here is Win994A by Cory Burr. MESS produces (arguably) slightly better speech results. This program DOES work on a real TI too!
QBOX is (formerly) commercially available software written by the designers of the TI Synth chip themselves (after they left TI). The software was re-discovered by Ben Yates after his endless search of the internet trying to find suitable software. Without Ben, it would still be impossible to generate ones own speech with the TI speech synth. There are no instructions with QBOX, but Ben kindly supplied copies of his correspondance with the programmers, which contained some rudimentary instructions. Thanks Ben. :-)
If anyone is interested in the souce, I have published it (TMS9900 assembler) here:
http://www.planet-99.net/wotw.htm