Radio Shack SP0256A AL2 Voice Synthesizer Chip vlog 10

[@gothesouthway]

He plugged that chip into the bread board and I was like "C'mon already! wire it up!"

[@Sirrom0206]

Maybe next time.

[@heckintech]

Ooooh, That is fascinating! I really miss a world where a place like Radio Shack could exist in every dang city. What fantastic times to be a nerd 🧡

[@Sirrom0206]

We may have better technology, but I don't think people are as smart as they once were. Back in the day, people wanted to learn new concepts, and build things. The current crop of young people just complain, point to their degrees, but have little to no understanding. Famous last words; "Let me Google that".

[@heckintech]

@@Sirrom0206 While I agree, the majority of people are significantly less technologically knowledgeable these days, everyone's literally just a product of whatever they were exposed to during their formative years. I count myself incredibly lucky to have had the opportunities I've had, being introduced to the Commodore 64, a 386, etc back in elementary school. My parents getting our own home computer, a 33mhz brick! Having a Radio Shack AND a Compucentre in my local mall, meeting employees who would chat computer stuff with me as a tiny little nerdling, etc. Without those kinds of resources, who KNOWS how I may have grown! I truly do not fault the youth for the current state of things, they didn't ask to be raised on tablets and smartphones by exhausted, burnt out parents. They didn't tank the economy, resulting in an exponentially rising cost of living, and stagnant wages. They sure as heck didn't shut down the Radio Shacks, that happened long before they were even old enough to have a job, much less, disposable income. 🤣 It was VERY much our generation and older that failed to maintain a technologically educated world. And realistically it's hardly our fault either, the vast majority of everyone are at their limits just trying to keep a roof over their head, and live a comfortable life. Most don't have the time or energy to learn the nitty gritty of things. All they've got room for, is quick, easy, and cheap. I'm lucky to have been able to carve out a sliver of time to keep tinkering! But realtalk, more than anything, I feel awful for the youth, and the world they've had to grow up in. The hypercommercialism, the vapid, shortform entertainment, the grotesque data harvesting masquerading as social media, every waking moment filled with advertisements, micro-transactions and paywalls everywhere, and they grow up being told how important a secondary education is to be able to afford to live, then when they slog for 3+ years and go deep in to debt over it, the world has already changed so much that their education is already on the cusp of obsolete, and any job hiring is actually 4 jobs in a trenchcoat, asking for 10+ years experience on a platform that's only existed for a year and a half, and pays little more than minimum wage? The world's a mess for these poor kids, and I don't blame them for a second for complaining. Maybe if we'd complained when we started seeing the cracks in the first place, they wouldn't be crushed by the rubble today. Also, what's wrong with "Let me google that"? 🙂 I am CONSTANTLY googling things! I love to learn!

[@BillAnt]

​@@Sirrom0206 - Especially doing hand on circuit building. They are constantly on TikTok wasting away their precious time imo

[@Barnaclebeard]

@@Sirrom0206 And yet, people have not changed. We are the same as we used to be. It is the environment that has changed. Point the blame in the right direction!! We are induced to be stupid by capital. Incidentally, stop abusing animals for other people's financial benefit. The more animals you consume, the younger you die and the more diseases you experience. (Google: "meat all cause mortality") The animals we create are morally equivalent to our own children and are owed the exact same unconditional love and protection. Stop participating in atrocity!!

[@Sirrom0206]

Yeah I hear you. The wife and I are slowly removing meat from our diet and it is due to pending disease issues. She is further along in the transition than I am. We also cut out alcohol. Cheers!

[@richardporcari7206]

Thank you for demo-ing the voice at the end. 😊 I loved the historical context too.

[@Sirrom0206]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@greg6500]

Was not expecting the history of this voice synth chip to be this interesting!

[@charleshoadley6882]

Wow what a blast from the past. I had a couple of these chips from Radio Shack, and built the thing on a perf board (all those wires!!) and it worked! I played with it for years. Now here's the kick: when Radio Shack started to add a ton of stuff to "clearance" (beginning to go out of bussiness) they had a bin in the store full of stuff. Including a bunch of the speech chips, marked down as a buck apiece! I freaked out and bought six of them (all they had). There were a couple of other stores in town (Lansing MI) who had some too. Over the years I kept them (think I had ten or so - no really) but during a move had to get rid of an entire workshop of parts, tools, Etc. You really can't take it with you scenario. That was more than 30 years ago (or so) and now they are very hard to find. I have seen a few on Ebay for - - $50.00 to 75.00 bucks. Oh if I had kept them. thanks for the very, very inspiring video!

[@Sirrom0206]

Ten? What was the plan? Actually, RS is still around in some places. There is one in Hondo Texas, and they have a DOT.COM website, however, as of right now American addresses can not order from them. www.radioshack.com/ www.store-locator.info/radio-shack/store-list

[@ThisIsMe3699]

Thank you for this. Brought back the memories.

[@delscoville]

I used that chip in the early 80's to build a speech synthesizer for my Commodore VIC 20. I still have a clock (for the blind) that also has this chip.

[@DeadCat-42]

The three chips I messed around with in highschool. This one, the dtmf decoder and one used to make a wefax decoder..

[@Enchurito]

actual audio starts at 3:50

[@st.charlesstreet9876]

Great post! Love this history of Radio Shack. Also do you remember back in the days of 80 Micro magazine a third party vender made another voice synthesizer that would start up saying “ Con-grat- u- Lay-Shun on by-ing the VR xx sin -thee- size- er!”😅

[@Sirrom0206]

Yes, I do! I’ve been looking at the following old-school magazines. Yeah, I live in yesterday. That's why I make RadioShack videos. But I can't find the voice chip you were talking about...at least not yet. Allied Electronics www.alliedcatalogs.radioshackcatalogs.com/index.htm#main_catalogs Radio Shack radioshackcatalogs.com/index.htm Heathkit catalogs Home Amiga Future www.amigashop.org/ Commodore Compute magazine ( I have at least twenty of these) www.commodore.ca/commodore-gallery/commodore-compute-magazines-issue-1-through-43/ Amiga magazines, various amr.abime.net/

[@ichemnutcracker]

Man, I miss Radio Shack. Sometimes you just need a discreet IC and you don't want to have to order some shady crap from Chinese scrap-pullers.

[@handywithducttape4824]

Radio Shack sold a companion chip to this one that was a text-to-speech processor that would assemble the phonemes from English text and send them to the speech chip. I can't remember what the part number was for that one. I bought both and layed them out on a single sided copper clad pcb with Radio Shack's dry transfer etch resist system for a high school science project. Controlled it with a Commodore 64. I got an 'A' on that one! Ah, the good ol' days.

[@Sirrom0206]

i'll look it up. What year was that?

[@jimwolsiffer4397]

I built one up to moimkc the war games voice , was pretty cool. I think my junk drawer still has one of these in it, still in the package

[@joinedupjon]

General Instruments was quite a storied firm - they also made video game on a chip that went into a lot of 1st gen home consoles.

[@Sirrom0206]

I did not know that. So, when are you going to make that video?

[@joinedupjon]

@@Sirrom0206 no plans - making videos looks like a lot of work tbh. I have seen one though - one of the apprentices at my dads work made a 'tank game' console as a hobby. project. I'm not sure if it was a kit or he designed the PCB himself and sourced the components. He did explain that one of the main costs was the TV modulator unit.

[@lurkerrekrul]

Back in the 80s, one of the Commodore-centric magazines, probably Compute!'s Gazette or Run, had had an article detailing how to build a speech synthesizer for the C64 using this chip. I didn't fully understand the article, so I wrote to the author and he wrote me back. I never did end up building it though. Just one of many hardware projects I never followed through on, like making a numeric keypad for the C64.

[@Sirrom0206]

If I had built everything that I dream of, I'd be labeled a mad scientist and probably have a time machine by now.

[@StuffBudDuz]

I bought (and still have!) a similar chip in 1983-ish. It was the previous synthesizer chip, but did not have voice capability yet. Your background music track is MUCH too loud, FYI. I'd suggest ditching BG music altogether, as it generally detracts, rather than adds to informational videos of this type. Thanks for sharing this. It's cool to revisit things from the 1980s, especially 8-bit related things!

[@Sirrom0206]

I have/had that chip also. If I still have it, it's buried deep, and I mean very deep in the garage. There are some places you just don't go poking around. The fear is justified.

[@MK-ge2mh]

I remember that chip on the shelf at Radio Shack! I wanted to try it out, but was too expensive for my teenage budget. Why would the Amiga need a network voice module? It had a very adequate software voice module system from its initial release which, in my opinion, was far superior to what that IC was capable of producing. Perhaps it was for standalone use so that voice messages could be sent remotely?

[@Aeduo]

Maybe for offloading the voice synthesis during more demanding/realtime operations? Or maybe part of some kind of out of band voice messaging system that the computer just doesn't need to handle at all?

[@0mongo0]

ARCnet didn't use a speech synthesizer chip. Why would it? It was a networking standard.

[@Sirrom0206]

That I don't know. But when I looked up the Datapoint 2200 computer, the documentation stated it was an option. Why would a connectivity (NETWORK) card have a voice chip? It makes no sense to me either. Maybe the card communicated with maintenance people. During my military service, we had technology that communicated with us maintenance troops but not the actual users in any meaningful way. I guess this was something like that. The video was primarily about the RS voice chip, everything else was gravy on top. I didn't know I would find the actual company that developed the chip, the first computer, and of all locations, San Antonio. But then again NewTek is in San Antonio. New Tek built/developed DigiView, and DigiPaint (DPaint), the Video Toaster, LightWave 3D, and the TriCaster, all for the Commodore Amiga systems. From there New Tek products migrated to Windows machines. Texas Instruments HQ was in Dallas; 1978: Speak & Spell, an educational device using TI's new speech-synthesis technology, is launched. Dell Computers is in Austin; Micheal Dell lives in Austin. Radio Shack was HQ'ed in Fort Worth. If you truly want to know, climb into your time machine, set the controls for 1980, San Antonio.

[@static-san]

Texas Instruments didn't use this chip, they made their own. Both this one (originally from General instruments) and TI's TNS5xxx/028x line used Linear Predictive Coding, but the implementation was different.

[@blairwigley]

Interesting video. How was it utilised on the arcnet cards?

[@Sirrom0206]

That I don't know. But when I looked up the Datapoint 2200 computer, the documentation stated it was an option. Why would a connectivity (NETWORK) card have a voice chip? It makes no sense to me either. Maybe the card communicated with maintenance people. During my military service, we had technology that communicated with us maintenance troops but not the actual users in any meaningful way. I guess this was something like that. The video was primarily about the RS voice chip, everything else was gravy on top. I didn't know I would find the actual company the developed the chip, the first computer, and of all locations, San Antonio. But then again NewTek is in San Antonio. New Tek built/developed DigiView, and DigiPaint (DPaint), the Video Toaster, LightWave 3D, and the TriCaster, all for the Commodore Amiga systems. Texas Instruments HQ was in Dallas; 1978: Speak & Spell, an educational device using TI's new speech-synthesis technology, is launched. Dell Computers is in Austin; Micheal Dell lives in Austin. Radio Shack was HQ'ed in Fort Worth. Cheers!

[@fincrazydragon]

I think I still have mine.

[@Lone432345]

Any Chance any of these where used with the Mattel Intellivision Intellivoice. I can hear it say "B-17 Bomber"

[@Sirrom0206]

Yep. I said that in the video. Ahhh, you did not stay til the end.

[@j.lietka9406]

What chip replaced that one? 🤔 Thank you 🤓

[@Sirrom0206]

Were you thinking about the CTS256-AL2 speech-to-text chip? Or the AY-3-8910 Sound Generator chip (CY-1987)? God knows I miss RadioShack. My kids think Best Buy is great. They just don't know. Best Buy is just a JC Penny's department store without a clothing department.

[@j.lietka9406]

@@Sirrom0206 I thought Radio Shack was making a kind of come back, but more on-line. I am not a real electronics whiz, but I look for electronics in dumpsters and curbside stuff. Thank you 🤓. Best Buy doesn't really sell component electronics.

[@dreampillet]

Pretty cool topic and presentation, but you should've added a sample to demonstrate the sounds it could produce.

[@Sirrom0206]

I did! The voice is at the end.

[@dreampillet]

@@Sirrom0206 Oh that's true. Sorry! I must've zoned out and missed it. Either way, good video!

[@AlT-vt3gb]

Why would TI use this chip? Their own speech chip was used in everything. Sure this isn't their chip just rebranded?

[@atomictraveller]

recorded this (it interprets apostrophes as pauses, don-t use them) i've built half a dozen speech dsps at least (xoxos vst). i just like to pick on electronics channels to see if i can find someone who will build an amplifier section for the ultrasound array in codeparade's "turning sound into a laser" video. "its just an amplifier" but i have the world's worst luck/most curses against building hardware. hey free west papua bud.

[@Sirrom0206]

I've not built anything real like an amp (or anything else) outside of work in twenty years. Sorry.

[@marcse7en]

Constructive feedback. Common irritation on MANY KZbin videos. Background music too loud, and very distracting. Suggest reducing volume, or removing music altogether. This is just my opinion and preference, but I know others often feel this way too!

[@Sirrom0206]

Sir, Yes Sir. Cheers!

[@Barnaclebeard]

You couldn't really control things by voice in the 80s. It was just a gimmick for kids to play with, it was not nearly reliable enough for practical use. You had to train individual words/phrases, and then you had to say the word exactly as you trained it, and it still wouldn't match most of the time.

[@Sirrom0206]

I would like to see that video!