TRS-80 Voice Synthesizer
unf...@mcs.net
Found the above for $5 in the back of a thrift shop. It's a silver-painted particle
board box, smaller and shorter than a shoebox, with the face covered in nylon
fabric, like a speaker (which it has). There's a volume switch and a "Device
Select" LED, and a 40-conductor ribbon cable emerging from the back,
terminating in a card edge connector (perhaps the same used to connect a
Model 1 to the expansion box?), and an apparently DC power connector. The
label on the back says "Part No. 26-1180," "Serial No. 101751MGH," and
"Power this unit with PS-7204-M Transformer only," along with four patent
numbers and warnings.
Examining it internally reveals that of the forty conductors, at most twenty are
actually connected to anything, and what I thought was a DC-in jack is routed
to a bridge rectifier before anything else, so it seems that it wants low-voltage
AC rather than DC.
I bought it because I have a Tandy Color Computer Model 2, which for some
reason was often called a TRS-80, but looking over the info on the web, it's
apparent that the box I have was designed for the original Model 1 or 3.
At http://www.byte.com/art/9602/sec5/art3.htm I found an old article about
speech synthesis that seems to imply that the TRS-80 Voice Synthesizer is
simply capable of generating and modulating frequencies in a manner
appropriate for speech generation, i.e. it has no vocabulary, that coordinates
phonemes and provides transitions. The old Byte article mentions another
article from the October, 1979 issue specifically about the device I found. I'd be
very grateful if anyone with a full collection of Bytes (of course you're out
there) could dig up that issue and send me any pertinent info.
Specifically, I need to know the AC voltage that this wants (i.e. what did the
PS-7204-M Transformer provide), and the pin-outs of the connector. Yes,
I'd like to try to connect this thing to my IBM-compatible PC's two parallel ports
and see if it'll make some noise. Sick, yes, but the thing looks great sitting atop
my 21" NeXT MegaPixel Display (getting that to work with Eggy Toast is
another pathology), besides, who can doubt the indispensibility of a
separate--possibly dubbed "Emergency"--audio channel, requiring no drivers to
relay helpful information such as "I'm sorry, Dave; I can't do that."
Thanks in Advance,
Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins
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David J. Pittella
Hi ....
As I have stated in other posts to this board .... I was a service manager
and
technician for Tandy in the good old days ... I recently moved my family
to Washington State, and left all Tandy documentation boxed in my moms
attic in Boston.
The voice synthesizer you have was designed for the TRS-80 Model 1
computer,
the Model 1 I/O bus was a 40 pin edge style connector. This device could be
plugged directly into a Model 1 CPU or to the I/O connector on the Model I
Expansion Interface.
You are correct about the AC adapter, it did provide AC ... If memory
serves me correctly ... the unit has either an 1/8" or 1/16" phone plug
for power input ... I THINK the adapter was actually something weird like
13 volts AC at about ??? MA (500?) ... I also seem to remember that the box
just used a simple regulator circuit ... I am pretty sure the board inside
just runs on 5VDC .. you probably hurt anything won't that by using a
12-15V AC or
DC adapter that can supply 500 MA or more (the bridge will take care of the
polarity if you decide to try a DC unit).
Also from memory ... that device used proprietary technology for its time,
I think
you will find that the circuit board has a section on it that has black
epoxy over
all the chips .. the service manual never provided a complete schematic.
It was my understanding that it used an early version of the TI Votrax chip
set,
I am not sure about this. I am also not well versed in voice synthesis. It
was a phoneme based voice synthesizer.
The way they designed the interface to the TRS-80 was very simple, the
device
shared a few bytes (don't remember how many!) of video memory on the
Model 1 ... writing a specific sequence of characters to these locations
sent commands to the voice synthesizer. If you are able to find a service
manual .. possibly even the owners manual ... you could probably figure out
a way to have this talk to a PC ... probably through a PC Parallel port ..
It would take a little research on Model 1 interfacing .... but very
possible.
David Pittella
unf...@mcs.net wrote in article <8480454...@dejanews.com>...
Bill Powers
The box you describe was built for the TRS-80 Model I. It
connected to the expansion port on the keyboard unit. The
way it worked was it was a memory mapped device. There was
a small window on the screen of the TRS-80 which you could
write characters to. These were phoenems which the box would
then try to translate to speech. It was funny to list a basic
program on the screen when the thing was on and you got this
unintelligible noise from the Speech Synth.
Ahh, the memories. :-)
Bill Powers
--
Digital Equipment Corporation - Nashua, NH
E-Mail: pow...@tle.enet.dec.com
Skip May
There were at least two voice synthesizers that I know about and have the
software for. The silver box is the radio shack version of which I also
have but have never tried to use. It was pretty crude sounding but I do
have the software somewhere (in process of moving) so keep my below email
address around if you can't find it.
The silver box plugs right onto the expansion interface of the model 1 I
believe.
The second unit I have also is the Votrax unit which works very well
using the phoneme (spell that right?) method and some pretty nice disk
software. If you told it to say a dirty word, it would come back and yell
at you "I can't say that" or "no I won't". This had us falling over
backwards with laughter when we heard it. You could easily make it say
bad words by spelling them out in sounds/phonemes. The unit I have went
right on the Model I EI and I'm told there was a model III/IV unit that
was just as nice. The votrax chip was a "standard" phoneme generator at
the time. From this point on your back on your own again.
In much time after I finish getting moved, I can dig out the rare and
lost software I have. I would hope to help preserve the use of the grey
cased machines as long as possible. Be sure to look at the web sites and
bb's to find/support the cause. Email to my address below only please.
thanks and good luck
skip may
ma...@indigo.ucdavis.edu
unf...@mcs.net wrote:
: Found the above for $5 in the back of a thrift shop. It's a silver-painted particle
: board box, smaller and shorter than a shoebox, with the face covered in nylon
: fabric, like a speaker (which it has). There's a volume switch and a "Device
: Select" LED, and a 40-conductor ribbon cable emerging from the back,
: terminating in a card edge connector (perhaps the same used to connect a
: Model 1 to the expansion box?), and an apparently DC power connector. The
: label on the back says "Part No. 26-1180," "Serial No. 101751MGH," and
: "Power this unit with PS-7204-M Transformer only," along with four patent
: numbers and warnings.
: Examining it internally reveals that of the forty conductors, at most twenty are
: actually connected to anything, and what I thought was a DC-in jack is routed
: to a bridge rectifier before anything else, so it seems that it wants low-voltage
: AC rather than DC.
: I bought it because I have a Tandy Color Computer Model 2, which for some
: reason was often called a TRS-80, but looking over the info on the web, it's
: apparent that the box I have was designed for the original Model 1 or 3.
Perry Martin
In article <8480454...@dejanews.com>, <unf...@mcs.net> wrote:
>Found the above for $5 in the back of a thrift shop. It's a silver-painted
>I'd like to try to connect this thing to my IBM-compatible PC's two parallel
I got to play with one of those for a month or two, but I don't have any
documentation. Here's what I think I remember:
It was for the Model I. I think it disappeared before the III came out.
It worked by mapping into one corner of the Model I video memory. I think
it "watched" a 16 or 32 byte window at the top of video memory, i.e. the
lower right corner of the screen. It processed each ASCII character as a
verbal phoneme.
The Model I 40 pin edge connector provides direct access to the Z80 memory
and address busses. You will need at least 14 address lines (maybe all 16),
5 or 6 data lines, a control line (Memory Write), and ground. Some of the
address lines can be hardwired - you only need to vary the address within
the video window. Video memory was 1K at the top of the first 16K, i.e.
0x3c00 to 0x3fff. You need the last 16 or 32 bytes of that.
You might stop by your local Radio Shack and see if they can order a copy
of the manual and a replacement transformer. It's a long shot (and you may
need to be persistant), but stranger things have happened.
Have fun.
--Perry Martin
David Librik
>sitting atop my 21" NeXT MegaPixel Display (getting that to work with
>Eggy Toast is another pathology), besides, who can doubt the indispensibility
>of a separate--possibly dubbed "Emergency"--audio channel, requiring no
>drivers to relay helpful information such as "I'm sorry, Dave; I can't do
>that."
Good luck. You may decide to get rid of it when you've read this.
The 40-pin connection that came out of the back of the TRS-80 Model I,
which this Voice Synthesizer connects to, was a direct copy of the 40
pins coming out of the Z-80 chip which ran the computer. That is, the
connection isn't really a "port" -- it was a "bus" connection, like
the slots inside a PC.
The voice synthesizer would "speak" all the phoneme-codes that were placed
in the last 16 bytes of video memory: bytes 3FF0-3FFF of the memory map.
The V.S. therefore has, built in, a partial version of address-decoding
circuitry. It decodes the address lines coming out of the Z-80, waits
for a "memory write" in its address range, takes the data byte that came
along with that address reference, and sends it to the Speech Synthesizer
chip. I don't know if it did anything else with the memory range: I think
one could just write all the information to a single byte (sequentially),
and the reason it mapped 16 bytes was just to make it easier for people
to PRINT a whole "chunk" at once from a BASIC program.
So in order to interface it, you're going to have to fake the Model I
bus output signals in all (or at least some of) their glory. The first
thing you'll need is the pinout for the 40-pin connection. I don't
have this, but hopefully someone else does -- it was printed in the
back of the various BASIC manuals and technical reference manuals.
Then, at the very least, you'll have to wire up a little connection
that translates from "parallel port on my PC outputs a byte" to
"40-pin TRS-80 port outputs 3FFF on its address lines, WRITE on its
read/write line, MEMORY ACCESS on its memory access line, and the
relevant byte on its data lines." There's probably more to it
than this, but I was not a hardware guy at all. Since I think
the Exclusive Oracle is lurking around comp.sys.tandy, maybe he can
give you some advice from his Kitszly wisdom.
Alternatively, if you can figure out the circuitry inside the Voice
Synthesizer, perhaps you can do an end-run around the address
decoding circuitry, and go straight from the PC parallel port to the
Speech Synthesis chip.
Oh yes, you are also going to need a copy of the Voice Synthesizer manual!
I'll say it again: good luck.
- David Librik
lib...@cs.Berkeley.edu
Perry Martin
David Librik <lib...@netcom.com> wrote:
>[ deleted ]
> I think
>one could just write all the information to a single byte (sequentially),
>and the reason it mapped 16 bytes was just to make it easier for people
>to PRINT a whole "chunk" at once from a BASIC program.
If this is correct (and it sounds likely), then the interface becomes a
lot simpler. I think "unferth" can probably make it work with just one
parallel printer port:
Hard-wire the address lines to any address in the window, e.g. 0x3ff
Connect the data lines to the printer port
Use the printer STROBE as the TRS-80 Mem Write - I think both are
active low
It *might* be just that easy. Good luck.
--Perry Martin