Make a Z80 Computer talk with the SP0256-AL2 Speech Processor
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ค. 2024
- Learn how to connect the popular 80's Speech Processor the SP0256-AL2, to a Z80 microprocessor.
The SP0256-AL2 was popular in 8-bit computing as back then making a computer generate speech was revolutionary. Relive those memories and create your own Talking Computer.
Find all the examples, schematics, datasheets and code from this video at github.com/bchiha/Ready-Z80/t...
00:00 Intro
01:13 Fake chips
02:02 Where to purchase a genuine SP0256-AL2 chip
03:21 How does the chip work?
05:45 Circuit schematic and interface with the Z80
08:29 Finished Add-On board and hardware setup
10:13 Z80 code setup
13:08 Making it Talk!
16:13 How to make works with the allophones
17:14 Generate allophones for over 130000 words
18:00 text2allphone program
19:51 My poor attempted to make music!
Links:
Try the text2allophone program online with a smaller dictionary of 3000 words (old version)
www.onlinegdb.com/Bymccymgv
By the SP0256-AL2 chip here
www.sciencestore.co.uk/acatalo...
Thanks for watching. If you are into the Z80, Amstrad and basic Electronics, like and subscribe! - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
That was a great chip. Back in the 80’s, Radio Shack sold them for around $12. I added them to MANY projects at the university. We automated all kinds of things. Especially scientific calibration and measurement. I interfaced this speech chip to a 6502, Z80, 8085 and 68000. It did sound “mechanical”, but it was the best available at the time. A friend of mine once spent 6 hours trying to get his to say “fire truck” to his satisfaction. Lol.
This chip was used by Gottleib in their pinball machine GoldWing. They used it for the bass synth in the music.
I etched my own PCB for this chip then interfaced it with my Atari 400 (48KB, B-Key upgrades). A handicapped boy's parents at the local college noticed my school project offered to buy it if I created a suck-blow straw for it as well - I did. We created a program to pick a starting letter then a word. I regret though, not pursuing it as a career. FYI, I bought a 130xe afterwards.
The last product, I designed, with a Z80, was a talking clock accessory, attached to the company's main product (Analog Logging Recorder), back in the late 1980s. It was later redesigned using an HC05 uC, as that unit more compact and used fewer parts, requiring much reduced assembly time. The speech processor used in those 2, were from TI. The chip just output whole words, and had a short, but adequate, vocabulary. It was also a custom chip (not found in databooks), but the original customer bailed out, and I happened to stumble upon them, just at the right time. I collected the unofficial documents from the local TI Sales office (remember - 1980s), and the company bought up a bunch of the, otherwise dead, inventory.
Nice work. I still have all of my speech chips from back in the 80’s, including this, the National DigiTalker, and also the Votrax SC01A and SSI-263 (SC02). My favourite was definitely the SC01A, which is Phoneme based and sounded a whole lot better than the SP0256. I made my own speech synthesiser for the C64 with the SC01A and coded an extension to BASIC to provide a SAY command for text to speech output. I remember working through a collins dictionary, page by page, to figure out the rules for translating English letter sequences to phonemes. Those were the days! :)
The CTS256-AL2 chip has a parser that looks at letter sequences in words to determine what allophones to use. The datasheet has an example on how it works. Interesting if you are into that stuff.
I had one, spent hours compiling sentences and then proudly played them to some friends. They couldn’t make out what the sentences were. I decided recorded words were going to be much more useful and tossed it into the bin.
The sound of my youth.
Oh man!!!
Somewhere deep in my storage unit is a VIC20, to which I soldered a ribbon cable, on the other end of which is a speech synthesizer circuit with that very chip!
(Actually I think it's on a connector - I don't think I'd have soldered directly on the VIC! - but it's been so long since I've seen it....)
I remember being in college, putting it together on a breadboard (I'd seen an article in a computer magazine and ran right out to Radio Shack to get the parts) and getting it to say "Hello" in a loop with a 5-line BASIC program, before having to go to a meeting.
I took the whole setup over to a friend of mine who was a CompSci major, and by the time I got back from the meeting he had it speaking typed-in words, sentences triggering from the F-keys, saving dictionary to tape, stutter mode (!!) - and all this in the 5K of RAM you got with the low-end memory cartridge!
I used it in college, too - in an experimental theater class. I made it recite - figured out and typed in each and every phoneme - the entire "All the world is a stage" speech by Shakespeare.
Sure could have used the CMU dictionary and Brian's program back then!
This is awesome - thanks for the memory trip!
Nice trip down memory lane. I had one of these from Radio Shack on my Z80 wirewrap system in around 1989/1990. That datasheet and the tables were just as I remember them! I can even smell paper of the the TI Volume 2 TTL Databook in my mind now. And thank goodness you modified that first code snippet to use OTIR, I was getting annoyed looking at it going "needs a termination condition, dammit!". Tieing the standby pin to the CPU WAIT seems a little heavy-handed though, would probably use polling or IRQ so can keep my crypto miner going in the background, LOL.
I use OTIR to configure the SIO so it only makes sense when sending out a data stream to a port. Ideally interrupts should be used instead of WAIT but the TEC computer that it was designed for didn't use interrupts normally.
@@ReadyZ80 Got it. For OTIR it's the perfect low budget solution!
I had one from Radio Shack too. It came with the serial ROM. Was expensive as I can recall. $12.95? Which back then was a lot of money for a blister pack of electronic stuff. I killed mine powering it with a sketchy PSU later on. But I messed around with it for a while before it fried. There's a few routines in it other than just the allophones as I can recall. One is these erie bell sounds that produces an oscillogram that looks like a spinning crown. Really bizarre stuff.
@@1pcfred I never knew about the Lissajous stuff. What did they use for the other scope axis, do you remember? I was all stoked to finally have a speech synth, but then got frustrated with how crappy most of the output actually was. There was no speech-to-phoneme software then that I knew of. And yeah, it still blows my mind that Radio Shack used to sell CPUs, TTL, and transistors. Times have changed!
@@zxborg9681 as I can recall the waveform just happened. Although my old Sencore was an XY scope. But I just remember using it in sweep mode to see the rotating crown oscillogram. Was a long time ago.
This one took me back... I bought a set of the -AL2 and it's companion TTS processor in the when Tandy were quitting them, and built the text-to-speech box in the early '90s. I haven't seen it in many years but it's here somewhere :)
I think that's the CTS0256 IC. I did it by software but I'm interested in how the CTS works.
Found a link to the datasheet for the CTS chip , but having some trouble posting it here.
Scott Baker does a good video on the CTS chip on his channel. The CTS uses a parser to examine parts of the words to determine which allophone to use. It is quite clever for the times. www.smbaker.com/cts256a-al2-text-to-speech-board
Mine's long dead and gone. It was an expensive chip even back in the day.
Back in the day I did an SPO256AL2 PCB for the Eaca Colour Genie, with some utilities like a hex code reader etc. I recall that at the time the SPO256 was really cheap!
The Mattel version of this chip isn't worthless. But you do need to load the allophone code (now available online, free) onto an external ROM IC if you want to make it speak arbitrary words & phrases.
Brilliant, thanks for sharing mate
No problem 👍
i think for retro computing it would be cool to have an LPC encoder which encodes audio files to the LPC code, that the SP256 uses internally. the AL2 version - if i remember correct - is the version that contains the ROM that has the according LPC data for every phoneme that it supports. but theoretically it could be used in the LPC mode. i remember the similar speech chip SP250? that sega used for a universal vector graphics arcade board G80 that has been used for "space fury", "battle star", "star trek", "zektor" .... that used their own LPC data
I recently got my olz z80 homebrew system out of cobwebs. it has an sp256 hip from Tandy alomg with a CTS256al2 control chip tor txt 2 alefone
Great video! Thanks for this tutorial. I may buy one to re-create the DK'Tronick board, for Amstrad ;o)
Have a look at www.cpcwiki.eu. There is a good article on the Dk'tronics Synth.
@@ReadyZ80 Thanks's for the link! Very useful infos, there... Ok, I just ordered the chip ;o)
Built one of these up for a parallel port for a PC back in the 80's. When I say PC I mean 'PC' as in IBM PC.
i always wanted a Dk'tronics Speech Synthesizer for my cpc.. i knew the voice as soon as the vid started!.. i never knew what chip it used tho..thanks!
First thing I thought of too! "The DK'Tronics Speech Syyynthesiiiiizerrrrrr".
Well allphone me😜 I watched the whole thing 😂 👍
Okay, I will.....WW EH LL PA2 DD2 AX NN1
@@ReadyZ80 Golden.
You have put in so much time and effort and still the speech coming from that soundchip is hardly understandable. Some forty years ago those computer speech things were simply not good enough. I still remember one of the first games with speech in it, something with ants or so, when you were beaten it said: "we gotcha!" but it sounded like "we kassa!" and in Dutch that last word means cash register. So it didn't make much cense.
Nowadays computer speech still works with allophones or phonemes so all the work that was done back then was not totally useless, only the actual sound generator is improved light-years!
I remember when all robots in sci-fi movies from forty years ago talked like that. Back then I got one of those chips and spent a lot of time experimenting with it and trying to make it talk more clearly. At home we also had a parrot and I was surprised when it started imitating the chip's voice very accurately with all its glitches.
I'm pretty sure the game you're thinking of is Dung Beetles for Apple II.
And I'm no linguist, but isn't "kassa" in the Germanic / Norse languages "cheese"? ;-)
@@drlegendre Käse is cheese in German, but there has to be an umlaud or a trema on the A. "Kaas" is the Dutch word for cheese. In Norway, you point your finger to the cheese and bring you hand to your mouth. Then the Norwegians understand you want to eat the cheese. They are very clever. And that is exactly the same as in Italy. So, in fact the Italians and the Norwegians speak the same language, sort of!
“Not ‘Art of Noise’”… LOL! Showing your age. 😂
I've been getting a bit more Paranoimia since I made that line
@@ReadyZ80 man, the hours I used to listen to that sort of music back then… Jean Michelle Jarre, Kraftwerk, Mike Oldfield… loved it.