Date   : Sat, 22 May 2004 10:04:40 GMT 
From   : "Thomas Harte " <thomasharte@...>
Subject: Re: [Electron] sound wave

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> ? No Electron game did speech.

Yes. Exile does. It says, surprisingly clearly, "Welcome to the land of t
he Exile" when the standard Superior 
branded loading screen is visible. It also quite audibly uses samples thr
oughout the game, although very short 
things of explosions and things, not speech.

> Superior investigated doing Speech ! for the Electron but abandoned it 
> because it wasn't possible.

I doubt it would be possible in the Speech sense. My very limited knowled
ge of these things suggests that 1bit 
samples tend to require a much higher sampling rate to sound reasonable t
han the 5 and a 1/2bit that I guess 
the BBC manages, so you're instantly in the realm of memory problems. And
 besides which, I'd dare imagine that 
it took an awful lot of pre-processing to clear the sound wave up - which
 wouldn't necessarily be possible in real 
time given the way phenomes have to be joined together.

I'll have my emulator dump the sample to a WAV or whatever and upload it
later.

Off topic: was just 16kb of sideways RAM in the base machines too much to
 ask? Certainly in Electron terms it 
would have matched the psychologically better 48kb of the ZX Spectrum and
 due to general hardware design 
given most programmers the 2Mhz they wanted...

> All the Electrons I owned/own had small proper speakers, the case of th
e 
> electron has holding plastic pins for a speaker.

Okay. In which case you rebut the anecdotal evidence I'd received, which
really was the most vague ever 
received. One of the programmers who was big back then had told me that t
hey pretty much all used 
piezoelectric speakers back then, and I know for sure the Spectrum and IB
M PC did.

In that case I need to look at [optionally applying] the sort of filters
that differentiate small speakers hidden 
inside blocks of plastic from the bigger much higher quality things peopl
e tend to use nowadays. I've found 
(since my speakers died) that my emulator sounds most accurate through he
adphones left casually in a desk 
drawer...

> Hmmm, the Spectrum had Psion Speech Chess, have you ever heard that ?

No. Did it sound completely awful? I've heard a few older demos, and Your
 Sinclair once came with a 'high quality 
edit sampler' (if you'd used it you'd understand why the phrase sticks in
 the mind) on the covertape which 
allowed you to feed waves in and then replay them. As the tape input is a
 1bit ADC, one can only assume these 
are the waves that came out again. It wasn't as scornfully dreadful as yo
u might assume.

Actually, I'm fairly sure I had a very similar piece of software for my S
AM Coup=E9...

-Thomas

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