Intellivoice cart- possible?

[toiletunes]

With POKEY getting expensive, I've been daydreaming about other sound chips. The other day, I bought a flood-damaged intellivoice. That got me thinking, would it be possible to reuse the sound chip and have something like Dungeon Stalker with built-in voice? Just a thought...

[+DrVenkman]

I've long wondered if ANY other, cheaper sound chip could be engineered for 7800 carts, something besides rare POKEYs or the evidently-problematic "HOKEY" project. Surely there are tens of thousands of cheap late 80's/early 90's alternatives like Yamaha synth chips that would be cheaper than POKEY. Use one of them for music, the internal TIA for percussive/firing and explosion sounds ...

 

Cue CPUWiz, Tep and others to tell us we're crazy in three ... two ... one ...

[toiletunes]

I imagine the obstacles would be part hardware (redesigning a cart PCB) part software (figuring out how to program a game to use the chip effectively) and a bit of 'the effort involved vs the small fan base makes it not worthwhile ' -But, it's fun to daydream.

[mr_me]

Before Mattel Electronics closed in 1984, the GI voice chip was cheap enough that they had the idea of including it on Coleco Vision cartridges.

 

The hard part is creating natural human sounding voices. Mattel had a multi-million dollar lab to do it. I think one of the honebrew guys figured it out. Otherwise you can use GI phonemes but that would sound like the Odyssey2 voice synthesizer. I'm sure someone could figure out the cartridge electronics to make it work. And like DrV said there are probably other chips that do full digitised sound easier.

[CPUWIZ]

I started playing around with a voice chip cart (ask Al), but you guys pissed me off and I won't make any more hardware.

 

J/K

 

I am far too busy and I prefer to just drop hardware and not let people drool for years.

[toiletunes]

Update: FWIW, Wikipedia says POKEY is 40 pins, Intellivoice chip is 28- so, no drop-in on existing boards. However, the Intellivoice chip was also used (with different pre-programmed words) in talking clocks and stuff. It might be fun to track down one of those clocks and do a chip swap- imagine a clock saying "Mattel electronics presents" every twelve hours or b-17 bomber saying "bogey at 3 pm!"

[CPUWIZ]

Update: FWIW, Wikipedia says POKEY is 40 pins, Intellivoice chip is 28- so, no drop-in on existing boards. However, the Intellivoice chip was also used (with different pre-programmed words) in talking clocks and stuff. It might be fun to track down one of those clocks and do a chip swap- imagine a clock saying "Mattel electronics presents" every twelve hours or b-17 bomber saying "bogey at 3 pm!"

 

Haha, that is not how they work, fun thought though.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_SP0256

[toiletunes]

darn.

[Jinks]

I started playing around with a voice chip cart (ask Al), but you guys pissed me off and I won't make any more hardware.

 

J/K

 

I am far too busy and I prefer to just drop hardware and not let people drool for years.

Keep the dream alive!

[Lynxpro]

Before Mattel Electronics closed in 1984, the GI voice chip was cheap enough that they had the idea of including it on Coleco Vision cartridges.

 

The hard part is creating natural human sounding voices. Mattel had a multi-million dollar lab to do it. I think one of the honebrew guys figured it out. Otherwise you can use GI phonemes but that would sound like the Odyssey2 voice synthesizer. I'm sure someone could figure out the cartridge electronics to make it work. And like DrV said there are probably other chips that do full digitised sound easier.

 

 

Weird. I guess they could justify that because the expense of doing that audio synthesis was already paid for from the titles for the Intellivision so it would just be re-using the code. That and the cost of the cart-based chip. They probably should've just done a "Mattel Expansion Module for the ColecoVision" that included said chip - or chips - and then bundled it with a coupon for $5 off 1 or 2 of their cartridge titles.

 

Cool in a way but that chip was dreadful compared to whatever chip TI used in their speech synthesis module for the TI-99 4/A. I mean, the voice work in Parsec is top-notched for its time. The only way it would be more perfect is if it had a sarcastic "where did you learn to fly?" added to it. We all had to wait a good 11 years after that for such perfection.

Edited August 31, 2017 by Lynxpro

[mr_me]

... However, the Intellivoice chip was also used (with different pre-programmed words) in talking clocks and stuff. It might be fun to track down one of those clocks and do a chip swap- imagine a clock saying "Mattel electronics presents" every twelve hours or b-17 bomber saying "bogey at 3 pm!"

 

Haha, that is not how they work, fun thought though.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_SP0256

I think that's how it would work except the B-17 Bomber phrases were on the cartridge not the voice chip. [it would say something, not sure what.]

 

 

 

Weird. I guess they could justify that because the expense of doing that audio synthesis was already paid for from the titles for the Intellivision so it would just be re-using the code. That and the cost of the cart-based chip. They probably should've just done a "Mattel Expansion Module for the ColecoVision" that included said chip - or chips - and then bundled it with a coupon for $5 off 1 or 2 of their cartridge titles.

 

Cool in a way but that chip was dreadful compared to whatever chip TI used in their speech synthesis module for the TI-99 4/A. I mean, the voice work in Parsec is top-notched for its time. The only way it would be more perfect is if it had a sarcastic "where did you learn to fly?" added to it. We all had to wait a good 11 years after that for such perfection.

Mattel learned that expansion modules don't sell. There was thought of a ram expansion module for the Atari 2600 but Mattel decided to put ram chips in their 2600 cartridges instead. I think Space Spartans voice sounds better than Parsec and Parsec is a 28K cartridge where Space Spartans is only 8K. Intellivoice games had a lot of compression in their speech.

Edited August 31, 2017 by mr_me