From: Fred Maxwell <rockbox_at_anti-spam.org>
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 15:19:37 -0400

In almost all of those cases, the speech synthesis was done by dedicated
speech synthesis hardware -- such as the General Instruments SPO256 speech
synthesis chip that I mentioned in an earlier post. Old video games of the
1980s often ran on Z80 chips at 4mhz, but they did it with special hardware
for the sound and graphics. You could not just take a random 4mhz CP/M
system and make it run Asteroids. Most TiVos use ~50mhz CPUs running Linux,
but you cannot duplicate the functionality of a TiVo with a generic 50mhz
486 PC and a copy of RedHat. Even modern systems rely on coprocessor
cards/chips for 3D video and sound.

By the way, I've been an embedded systems firmware/software engineer since
1980, so you can bet that I'm not just making this stuff up.

Regards,
  Fred Maxwell
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se
> [mailto:owner-rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se] On Behalf Of Kevin R. Jones
> Sent: September 21, 2003 1:20 PM
> To: rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se
> Subject: RE: an idea/suggestion
>
>
> I can remember synthetic speech on the apple 2e, or even on
> one of the old ataris.
>
>
>
Received on 2003-10-10