Speech on the Xpand AY unit

Moggy · Post by **Moggy** » Sat Nov 26, 2011 2:06 pm

Wow found this on the German Zeddy forum courtesy of Sascha200

http://forum.tlienhard.com/phpBB3/viewt ... ?f=2&t=606

The Zeddy speaks!! well done Sascha

Regards

Moggy

Post by **Paul** » Sat Nov 26, 2011 6:12 pm

The original Idea was to have digitized music on the Zeddy as we had on AtariST.

Sascha seems to make siginificant progress.

Andy Rea · Post by **Andy Rea** » Sat Nov 26, 2011 9:21 pm

impressive but i feel a little hungry.... 2 or 3 seconds in 14K

Andy

P.S. When is the SLOW mode version comming

sascha2000 · Post by **sascha2000** » Mon Nov 28, 2011 9:38 am

>well done Sascha

Thank you Moggy!

I implemented the same just to play around with my MrX soundcard (http://www.eightbits.de).

I will update my www site with files for download asap. Either the latest version of the card I will show there.

For speech synthesis it is planned to build a daughter board for the MrX with a speech synthesizer. I hope I can present the same in January/February 2012.

If you have any good 8bit mono wav files you want to listen on your zx, could you post them?

Moggy · Post by **Moggy** » Mon Nov 28, 2011 12:26 pm

sascha2000 wrote:>well done Sascha

Thank you Moggy!

I implemented the same just to play around with my MrX soundcard (http://www.eightbits.de).

I will update my www site with files for download asap. Either the latest version of the card I will show there.

For speech synthesis it is planned to build a daughter board for the MrX with a speech synthesizer. I hope I can present the same in January/February 2012.

If you have any good 8bit mono wav files you want to listen on your zx, could you post them?

Just a question sascha, is the Zeddy fast enough to read and execute the data straight from the SD card?
That way whole tracks could be played.

Pink Floyd in 8 bit yesss

Regards
Moggy

sascha2000 · Post by **sascha2000** » Mon Nov 28, 2011 1:09 pm

Hello Moggy,

>Just a question sascha, is the Zeddy fast enough to read and execute the data straight from the SD card?

I cannot give you an answer now.....sorry ....

However if you look at my code I have posted in the german forum there is a pause implemented to get about 8000Hz:

LD A,20
wait1:
dec A
jp nz, wait1

If the zeddy+zxpand is able, to read one byte from the SD-Card within the time these 20 loops need, it should be possible.

I will have a look at the zxpand documentation and will play around with the same. As soon as I know more I will inform you.

Regards
Sascha

sirmorris · Post by **sirmorris** » Mon Nov 28, 2011 4:37 pm

Excellent stuff!

Unfortunately there is some latency involved with reading from SD card. At each sector boundary a command must be sent to advance the sector number. This takes some milliseconds. In native SD card mode you can request multiple sectors from the SD card and effectively stream data with no delays, but in SPI mode this is not possible.

With some trickery it may be possible to perform the serial read using interrupts and a double-buffer in the interface firmware - but this would be a major re-write.

I think therefore that Dark Side of the Moon is unlikely to appear from the zxpand any time soon

Moggy · Post by **Moggy** » Mon Nov 28, 2011 5:45 pm

sirmorris wrote: Excellent stuff!

Unfortunately there is some latency involved with reading from SD card. At each sector boundary a command must be sent to advance the sector number. This takes some milliseconds. In native SD card mode you can request multiple sectors from the SD card and effectively stream data with no delays, but in SPI mode this is not possible.

With some trickery it may be possible to perform the serial read using interrupts and a double-buffer in the interface firmware - but this would be a major re-write.

I think therefore that Dark Side of the Moon is unlikely to appear from the zxpand any time soon

@ Charlie
Is the Xpands own remaining ram not big or fast enough to act as a reservoir/buffer or is the card reading side of things still not fast enough to keep it topped up

Moggy

sirmorris · Post by **sirmorris** » Mon Nov 28, 2011 8:08 pm

The PIC in use on the ZXpand has a roomy 1536 bytes

Once the file system has had its 700-odd then there's very little left :¬(

Moggy · Post by **Moggy** » Mon Nov 28, 2011 8:29 pm

sirmorris wrote:The PIC in use on the ZXpand has a roomy 1536 bytes

Once the file system has had its 700-odd then there's very little left :¬(

@Charlie I was referring to normal ram as opposed to any of the xpands pics could not a wav file be fed/ buffered into say, for want of a better description, the usual 16k as opposed to being stored there and read by Saschas' player and topped up from the card as it empties, the emptying of this store/buffer would allow the card reader to buy the milliseconds it needs to get past its sector advancing duties, bearing in mind it takes around 2-3 seconds to empty the ram of the 14k or so example surely the card could keep up, or is that too simplistic?

Sorry if I'm not getting this across very well but I hope You get My drift

regards

Thicky

Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

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