SAM Speech Synthesis for the Commodore 64

[tokyoracer]

NEAT! Is this from your C128 tower? Nice work, funny video!

I actually have a Speccy speech synth called a 'Sweet Talker' (though far from what i'd call sweet sounding lol) which is not too dis-similar sounding to yours (amazingly).

[tokyoracer]

Thanks! This is actually on a Commodore 64 with JiffyDOS, but otherwise a stock machine. The 128 Tower is not hooked up atm, but it will be hooked up again shortly as I clear some desk space.

Was your Speccy speech synth hardware or software based? SAM was purely software based.

Hardware, they only have a little internal beeper speaker so you would need a speech synth box for a ZX to talk.
Mind you it comes with a demo cassette. Clever thing is it was designed for programmers and game editing (basic) so you could add scripts for games to communicate with the talker for real speech, which I think is real clever for a Spectrum. The cassette mentioned about that possible use.

P.s. That question about your hardware was a bit of a dumb one as I wasn't paying attention to the start-up C= basic title screen, sorry!

[tokyoracer]

I agree it was a laugh and pretty ground breaking when it was first released.

I still find it funny how people went crazy over the Macintosh talking (and some pathetic scrolling text) in 1984, yet the C64 was just as capable 2 - 3 years prior to that.