intvdave Posted November 11, 2021 Share Posted November 11, 2021 Space Spartans: *not* as stored on cart. The phrase "SHEILDS" is stored as "SHIELD" and "S". HELLO COMMANDER COMPUTER REPORTING HYPERDRIVE TRACKING COMPUTER SHIELDS IMPULSE DRIVE BATTLE COMPUTER DESTROYED (WOMAN) TWO THIRD DOWN ONE THIRD DOWN REPAIRED REPAIR ON OFF UNDER REPAIR STARBASE THREE TWO ONE UNDER ATTACK DESTROYED (MAN) ALIEN ALIENS ENERGY LEVEL THE BATTLE IS OVER Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 11, 2021 Share Posted November 11, 2021 Bomb Squad: not in correct order but has all the phrases BOMB SQUAD MINUTES TILL BLAST TESTED THE CODE THE CODE FIGURE OUT THE CODE ARE YOU SURE GOOD GOING OK OK OH NO (PAUSE? NO SOUND) CUT THIS OUT THIS OUT OUT REPLACE THIS YOU DID IT YOU DID IT YOUR'RE A HERO THEY'LL BE LOOKING FOR US THEY'LL NEVER DO IT IN TIME IT WON'T BE EASY THIS UP MORE DOWN MORE LEFT MORE RIGHT MORE WRONG PART WRONG ORDER RESOLDER IT 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1980gamer Posted November 11, 2021 Share Posted November 11, 2021 What's left? WSMLB and Magic Carousel To bad you couldn't pull TI99 speech for use on Intellivision, you could add the voice to Microsurgeon and Demon Attack. As well as grabbing the Parsec phrases etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BSRSteve Posted November 11, 2021 Share Posted November 11, 2021 3 hours ago, intvdave said: BSRSteve, I have been successful in understanding the original games and how they use voice. Would you share the French, German, and Italian ROMs with me to see if I can pull the voices out? Les Spartiates De L'Espace.itv Gli Spartani Dello Spazio.itv Spartaner Aus Dem All.itv 3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 11, 2021 Share Posted November 11, 2021 5 hours ago, 1980gamer said: What's left? WSMLB and Magic Carousel To bad you couldn't pull TI99 speech for use on Intellivision, you could add the voice to Microsurgeon and Demon Attack. As well as grabbing the Parsec phrases etc. And Space Shuttle and Quest I forgot about the two you mentioned. Aaaarrrggghhh... more work! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 7 hours ago, BSRSteve said: This is a start. Check out the Italian (?) title screen audio. This tells us the games have at least the title audio. ivoicex0000.wav 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 8 hours ago, BSRSteve said: BSRSteve, do you have the IVOICE.BIN for any other language? I can pull out the phases but not get them working in the game. It seems that the International versions of the game is relying on different IVOICE.bin data. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 8 hours ago, BSRSteve said: BSRSteve, do you have the IVOICE.BIN for any other language? I can pull out the phases but can not get them working in the game. It seems that the International versions of the game is relying on different IVOICE.bin data. After looking at the French and German games, I am guessing these two do not have valid voice tracks. Maybe only Italian is working so... do you have the Italian IVOICE.bin file? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BSRSteve Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 3 hours ago, intvdave said: BSRSteve, do you have the IVOICE.BIN for any other language? I can pull out the phases but not get them working in the game. It seems that the International versions of the game is relying on different IVOICE.bin data. What do you even mean by IVOICE.bin data? I don't think I am familiar with that. I have some of the original, unprocessed voice recordings, but no other data or source files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mr_me Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 The Intellivoice sp0256 chip has 2kB of built-in ROM. I'm guessing ivoice.bin is a dump of that rom from a standard Intellivoice. The engineering description on Blueskyrangers.com says the rom has both speech data and instructions/program. Speech data is mostly numbers and also the phrase "Mattel Electronics presents". The Intellivoice description says a couple of international Intellivoice prototypes were built and the game descriptions say the international Intellivoice is required. The foreign language Space Spartans rom files are each 4k larger than the English Space Spartans so you might think it has the foreign language equivalent of all the phrases/words/numbers in the sp0256. You might need one of those international Intellivoice prototypes to know what's on its rom. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 Looking at the code, the game is trying to call internal phrases that are not included in the English version of the intellivoice. The phrase "Mattel Electronics presents" is included "internally" on the Intellivoice. The International games is looking for the phrase internally also but at a location not on the English version. This might explain for Joe Z made little progress with getting the voices to work. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 7 hours ago, BSRSteve said: What do you even mean by IVOICE.bin data? I don't think I am familiar with that. I have some of the original, unprocessed voice recordings, but no other data or source files. Are the German and French recordings you have complete? I am wondering if the Italian was created first and the German and French were not completed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mr_me Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 (edited) 1 hour ago, intvdave said: Looking at the code, the game is trying to call internal phrases that are not included in the English version of the intellivoice. The phrase "Mattel Electronics presents" is included "internally" on the Intellivoice. The International games is looking for the phrase internally also but at a location not on the English version. This might explain for Joe Z made little progress with getting the voices to work. Without the international intellivoice rom dump, another option would be to modify the emulator to play .wav files of intellivoice speech rather than emulate the speech. Mattel should have just put the internal speech on the cartridge and used standard intellivoice. They already went to 12k cartridges for B17 and Bomb Squad. Edit: Forgot that people can now make new intellivoice compatible code from .wav files so that's another option. But how come it doesn't say phrases stored on the cartridge rom through a standard intellivoice? Edited November 12, 2021 by mr_me Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BSRSteve Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 The international Intellivoice supported all three languages, so there needs to be code at the beginning to set up the Intellivoice to use the proper language. This code should be similar in all three versions, with just the data being sent changed. I am pretty sure all the language data was available at the time I did the conversions (and the cartridge size would support that), though most of what I was doing was changing the way the numbers were spoken, due to the different syntaxes of the various languages. The initialization code difference may be why the phrases on the cartridge misbehave. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Lathe26 Posted November 12, 2021 Share Posted November 12, 2021 On 11/11/2021 at 9:39 AM, BSRSteve said: Les Spartiates De L'Espace.itv 24 kB · 8 downloads Gli Spartani Dello Spazio.itv 24 kB · 7 downloads Spartaner Aus Dem All.itv 24 kB · 6 downloads I was trying them out in jzintv and there is no audio (visuals and controls are fine). I can get audio (both regular and Intellivoice) from other game ROMs. Perhaps this is a "missing CFG" issue? When I load this ROM using jzintv -z3 -v1, it prints the following at the console. Legacy BIN+CFG [0x5000...0x6FFF] Legacy BIN+CFG [0xD000...0xDFFF] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BSRSteve Posted November 13, 2021 Share Posted November 13, 2021 5 hours ago, Lathe26 said: I was trying them out in jzintv and there is no audio (visuals and controls are fine). I can get audio (both regular and Intellivoice) from other game ROMs. Perhaps this is a "missing CFG" issue? When I load this ROM using jzintv -z3 -v1, it prints the following at the console. Legacy BIN+CFG [0x5000...0x6FFF] Legacy BIN+CFG [0xD000...0xDFFF] I have never actually used jzintv, but I don't know what would make it not give you normal game audio (though Space Spartans is far from the noisiest game in that department). 56D seems like the likely arrangement for the game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mr_me Posted November 13, 2021 Share Posted November 13, 2021 Jzintv assumes the following when no cfg file is given. 5000-6FFF, D000-DFFF, F000-FFFF And it does produce the sound effects with these roms, but not the intellivoice speech. What's stopping it from saying the intellivoice phrases in the cartridge rom? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BSRSteve Posted November 13, 2021 Share Posted November 13, 2021 11 minutes ago, mr_me said: Jzintv assumes the following when no cfg file is given. 5000-6FFF, D000-DFFF, F000-FFFF And it does produce the sound effects with these roms, but not the intellivoice speech. What's stopping it from saying the intellivoice phrases in the cartridge rom? I suspect it is the code to initialize the voice unit. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Lathe26 Posted November 13, 2021 Share Posted November 13, 2021 Ok, normal audio is working (non-Intellivoice). Expected sounds on a screen that doesn't produce non-Intellivoice sounds; just needed to move further along in the game. As for Intellivoice, I'm not hearing any. I have the ivoice.bin file in the correct place and specified -v1 at the command-line to force Intellivoice to be present (this works with normal Space Spartans). Maybe the Intellvoice code in these games wasn't completed or isn't compatible with the normal Intellivoice? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 13, 2021 Share Posted November 13, 2021 2 hours ago, BSRSteve said: I suspect it is the code to initialize the voice unit. Is the international languages for the phrase "Mattel Electronics presents" in the cart? This may explain why the initialization code is different than English Space Spartans. Using the english Space Spartans code did not work. I could only rip out the phrases but they do not work correctly either. Was the international languages encoded differently than the english? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BSRSteve Posted November 13, 2021 Share Posted November 13, 2021 Without Joe's permission, here is what he said to me three years ago about the international Space Spartans. Quote I've spent a little time trying to pick apart what exactly is getting sent down the speech FIFO, in an attempt to stub out the missing international speech ROMs. My goal is to get to the point where it will at least play the samples embedded in the game without hanging the Intellivoice. In the French version, at least, there's a nice table of "PAGE 4; JMP xxxx" samples that give me 95 entry points into the $4xxx ROM. The appears to be at $52E9 - $5464. One potentially frustrating aspect here is that some of the entry points seem to have "side effects," such as setting the precision map. (This affects how certain Intellivoice opcodes are interpreted.) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Lathe26 Posted November 13, 2021 Share Posted November 13, 2021 1 hour ago, BSRSteve said: Without Joe's permission, here is what he said to me three years ago about the international Space Spartans. Thanks. I was already starting to go down the debugging rabbit hole with the German Space Spartans. I already could see the code fill up the FIFO, telling the Intellivoice to start playing the FIFO, the FIFO made room for 2 more writes, then the Intellivoice was stuck. Joe's comment above shows he already went 2 levels deeper and got a lot closer to the issue (I somewhat follow what he's saying above). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 17, 2021 Share Posted November 17, 2021 (edited) On 11/13/2021 at 12:51 AM, BSRSteve said: Without Joe's permission, here is what he said to me three years ago about the international Space Spartans. Progress!! Here are some voices being played. We are missing "Mattel Electronics" but the title screen voice is correct as is "hello commander computer reporting" spartans2.wmv Edited November 17, 2021 by intvdave Update video 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Intymike Posted November 17, 2021 Share Posted November 17, 2021 1 hour ago, intvdave said: Progress!! Here are some voices being played. We are missing "Mattel Electronics" but the title screen voice is correct as is "hello commander computer reporting" spartans2.wmv 211.49 kB · 2 downloads Our fellow Italian friends will now go nuts over this! Awesome! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted November 18, 2021 Share Posted November 18, 2021 6 hours ago, Intymike said: Our fellow Italian friends will now go nuts over this! Awesome! And now our German friends will also. german.wmv 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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