Digital Fluff

Thanks to @Bomberman93 and @colecovisionfanforever for making a Phoenix console available to me to test with. And thanks to the technical insight from @Tursi , the cartridge is now working on the Phoenix console. It turns out that the timing on the Phoenix console is just a little tighter compared to a real ColecoVision console. If you are the owner of a Phoenix and have one of the cartridges from the first batch, please contact me to work out an exchange. Also, if anyone has a spare Phoenix console available, send me a PM to make sure all future releases are Phoenix compatible.

Having played with sample sound playing for the ColecoVision a little follow-up to the Coleco clock collection. This time it is a speaking clock. Because of the size of the samples used it is in a separate rom file. Download below. ColecoSpeakingClock.rom

Is there any way to recognize this mythical machine of yours from software?

I had a look at the F18A was not familiar with it. Maybe the MKII will solve the problem for you.

Hate to reply to myself, but I have done the test with transforming phonemes using voice2psg and unless I have made a mistake somewhere, the results are not great (which I more or less expected). For reference I have put the new demo and the transformed phonemes on this message. They might be cool sound effects for someone 🙂 ColecoSAM demo2.rom phonemes.h

Pong is now 50 years old. Got a spare ColecoVision and CRT monitor? Why not turn it into a Pong clock? Or a Tetris clock. Or a Word clock. No spare ColecoVision available? Could always go for this little gadget: http://emwires.com/ESP32USB/index.html#ESP05 . ROM attached. Happy Pong day. ColecoClock.rom

How about an on-screen keyboard?

OK, that was a fun trip down the rabbit hole. So voice2psg does about the same thing as the matlab version? (1/60[s] of a Sample in) -> (Fourier transform) -> (3 x dominant frequency + volume out) ? Will have to do a test with phoneme samples to see what the result will. Thanks for the tip.

I was not aware of any phoneme player being available and my google-fu on this board results in me not finding it either on this forum. How are voiced and unvoiced consonants handled? There is a reason that S.A.M. is using samples for them.

Yes, I think it is amazing. And it is really well done in the Uridium case. With some heavy pre-processing (and probably a lot of trial and error) you can have something approaching speech at 50/60 Hz. But again. Not the point. I'm shooting for 11025 Hz sample playback and my original question for feedback still stands. How does it 'real world' sound on an NTSC / phoenix machine? I can only test with emulator and PAL machine here.

You had to spoil the surprise ;-)

No big secrets here. All information you need to write your own sample player can be found here: https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/06/sampled-sound-1980s-style-from-sn76489.html

Hey, thanks for the feedback. The 'Hello, my name is SAM' sample is actually only 8571 bytes. But that is not the point. It was generated with S.A.M. (have a quick look here https://discordier.github.io/sam/ if you are not familiar with it). And I have a solution for breaking the 32k barrier. What system did you use? And if you compare it with the S.A.M. from the link, which one is closer?

Hello everyone, first post here. For a new project I am working on, well, it requires using sampled sound. This question is not about how to play sampled sound (I think I have it figured out). My question really is what sounds good and on what type of system? As I only have a PAL system and an emulator here, for me option 6 is sounding OK and with correct speed on hardware. Option 1..4 sound good on the emulator. I would really like to get some feedback from people with other systems (NTSC, phoenix etc.). Would anyone be willing to test out the attached rom and report back to me? Include what type of system you are using and how it sounds. Feedback very much appreciated. ColecoSAM_test.rom