[DECtalk] DecTalk emulator

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,

What I wish someone would do is figure out how to emulate a DECtalk PC 
or Express and make it really work well, then export that into a DLL or 
something.

FWIW, I really don't buy the lost source code story about why Force 
messed it up so horribly, then nobody was ever able to revert it and 
make it sound like it once did.

Jayson

On 7/29/2019 9:47 AM, Don wrote:
> On 7/29/2019 12:19 AM, Aksel Leo Christoffersen wrote:
>> The zip-file from archive.org, is the exact same emulator, just without
>> MAME. I’ve tried it my self.
>
> MAME is the emulator:  Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.
>
> To emulate different arcade games, it -- as a program -- PRETENDS to be
> various types of computers.  When "fed" EXACT COPIES of the Read Only
> Memory chips that were installed in those games, the corresponding
> CPU chip emulator interprets the contents of those ROMs to behave in a
> manner similar to the actual, physical CPU chip did in the real game.
>
> Because the original CPU chips used in these arcade games were so much
> slower than modern CPUs in our PCs, the emulator PROGRAM can provide
> comparable performance in a PC even though it has to do far more work
> to interpret what the ROMs would have told the original CPU chip
> hardware to do.
>
> The original DECtalk product was implemented with a Motorola MC68000
> microprocessor accompanied by sixteen 16KB ROMs -- 256KB of "program".
> This included all of the algorithms to convert the text that was
> presented to the TTS via its serial port.  They also contained the
> various letter-to-sound rules used to convert arbitrary sequences of
> characters (words) into sounds.  As well as rules to handle words
> that were "exceptions", rules to convert sequences of digits into
> spoken numerical quantities, etc.
>
> A Texas Instruments TMS32010 Digital Signal Processor (a very fast
> CPU optimized for doing the sort of math involved to create waveforms)
> generated the actual audio signals that were fed to the speaker.
>
> (They could also be fed to a telephone line due to the design of
> the hardware -- your DECtalk could answer the phone and interact
> with the caller using synthetic speech).
>
> The ZIP file mentioned is just the contents of the ROMs -- two different
> versions.  The "suffix" on each file determines which physical ROM chip
> gets the contents of that file.  So, "e18" is an actual chip designation
> on the circuit board.  Noting the presence of two e18's means there are
> two different versions of the contents for the e18 ROM chip. Ditto with
> the other ROMs.
>
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