From: Grósz Attila (gyros_at_freemail.hu)
Date: 2005-04-12 23:56:18
Hi Richard, Nice to see you back :-) I still haven't given up on emulating the Magic Voice and the Toshiba 6721A in general. A while ago, I have successfully extracted (some of) the PARCOR parameters from the WAV samples you guys have extracted from a 364. I used this Japanese open source toolset: http://kt-lab.ics.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/SPTK/ I have also sort of successfully resolved the interfacing between the speech chip and the ROM program which I assume mostly analogous in the two hardware. Based on the Toshiba data sheets available on Funet (BTW, where are the other pages?) I have noted the power up state of the speech chip: Synth condition set - filter stages : 10 - repeat available : yes - frame length : 20 ms/frame - bit rate : 96 bits/frame This already gives a few hints about what sort of parameters we could expect... Bearing in mind that Richard Wiggins was the one who designed the Speak n Spell toy at TI and later headed Commodore's short liven Speech Division, I assume these two US patents are also handy when trying to figure out how those ROM parameters were fed to the lattice filter in the LSI: 4209844 4970659 Use www.freepatentsonline.com to grab them. I did so, too, but it is really _tough_ read considering I am not an engineer. Besided it is several dozen pages long. It does shed some light though and I hope it will get brighter with time :-) Richard Atkinson wrote: >I've had a go at hand-disassembling the first part of the Magic Voice >code, using information from the schematics. The code starts up in Ultimax > > Great! I have attempted making a CRT image of it with Markus Brenner's MCRT but I failed miserably. Would someone else try that who is more literal with the C64 than I? :-) >logic. I put my commented disassembly up on the web: >http://www.atkinsoft.com/magic_voice_startup_code.txt > > On its way.... :-) >The code allows a few educated guesses at what some of the control signals >do. PB6 (connected to pin 9 of the gate array) seems to be used to select > > I do have some guesses at the C364 part maybe we could compare them once. >think the GAME# function on the gate array should be an output not an >input. The unmarked signals (pins 7, 8 and 9) all appear to be inputs. > > > Is there more info available over the MOS8706R0 ? Data sheets perhaps? Has someone access to www.freetradezone.com ? They seem to have the T6721A as well, by the way... but it is not free. >Will try disassembling the code copied to $C000-$C5FFF tonight. > > Eager to hear about the results! Regards, Attila Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list
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