I saw this one on Music Thing. It was posted by Stamba on the CBS.nu forum. You will find more shots and info there. If anyone knows more about this feel free to comment.
"Build in 1984 by the french company Techni Musique based in Clermont-Ferrand. This unit has also been massively produced for the Amstrad 464/6128 and distributed in primary schools with the “Plan informatique pour tous”.
Unfortunately the Commodore 64 hadn’t a big success in France so this Commodore 64 version seems to be quite rare! It plugs into the cartirdge port of the Commodore 64/128 and features 2 audio outputs"
I could never figure out why anyone would make a hardware speech synth for the C64, when the SID did a fantastic job itself with software. Here's S.A.M. software on a C64 doing its best Steve Perry impersonation: AY-3-8910
ReplyDeleteMost of these speech cartridges for different home computer systems are based on the General Instruments SP0256 family of speech synthesizer chips, using LPC synthesis just like the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell units.
ReplyDeleteSince LPC uses filters to construct the different formants it is probably superior to what most 8 bit computers could do at the time with cpu power alone.
If this is indeed an LPC-based synthesizer used for singing it is the first time i've seen anything like it. Very interesting.
Hey ;)
ReplyDeleteI found some other informations
Based on the MEA8000 speech synth.
http://www.cpcwiki.com/index.php/MEA8000
http://www.cpcwiki.com/index.php/Image:TMPI_4.jpg