Speech board idea...

Hey everyone,

So. I was thinking... (That should be enough to send everyone running for
cover... ;-)

This Star Trek/Space Fury/Etc. Speech board has been bothering me since
those SPO-250 speech chips seem impossible to find. Have any of you tried
playing with the ISD (Information Storage Devices) Single Chip Voice
record/playback chips?

The ISD2500 series offers 8KHz sampling with 60 seconds of voice storage.
"Messages" are addessable under MCU control. Price in singles is about
$14, which drops to $12 in 10's.

They store sound as roughly 8-bit samples in an EEPROM array, so sound
quality *should* be pretty good-- and they include antialiasing and
smoothing filters. The downside is that they need to be "loaded" with the
samples from an analog source. (Not a HUGE deal really.)

My idea:

Take one of these little 60 second devils and make a series of .WAV files
that are played by a PC from the "original" sample boards. (Processing on
the PC might even help improve the sound quality-- digital gain and
equilization and whatnot.) Then, "load" the ISD chip with the samples from
a little Visual Basic program driving the .WAV files and a couple lines on
the Parallel port to control the "play/record" lines on the ISD chip.
(This would be for "automated" production, you could just as easily do it
by hand to experiment with.)

Then, just have a little processor that takes the "phrase" input from the
G-80 system and selects the appropriate sample in the ISD and hits "play".
The processor (I suppose a PIC 16C54 would work. Had to get my PIC plug
in. :-) could also take 2-3 "game select" lines to use for "bank select"
which samples to play. (so 00 is Star Trek, 01 is Space Fury, etc...)

I suppose if someone is doing an all-in-one DSP sound card that the samples
aren't a problem, but this looked kinda cool from the "easy to put
together" standpoint. (Probably 2 chips?)

Comments?

-Clay

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
Received on Wed Jun 25 12:02:10 1997