Watford Beeb Speech Synthesiser

[Pernod]

Does anyone have a Watford Beeb Speech Synthesiser?

It's a speech synthesiser that connects to the userport and requires a ROM. I'm specifically looking for the ROM to potentially emulate it. Seems quite rare!

[dv8]

This looks like the correct ROM (I don't own the hardware so can't test it).

Watford_Speech.zip

(4.5 KiB) Downloaded 149 times

[Pernod]

This looks like the correct ROM (I don't own the hardware so can't test it).

Thanks, looks good. Did you find it elsewhere, or from your own collection?

[dv8]

Did you find it elsewhere, or from your own collection?

I've accumulated a big collection of ROM images downloaded from various sources over the years.
This one originally came from Wouter Scholten's ROM archive.

[SteveF]

I used to have one of these (well, I still do, *somewhere*!) and I have a slightly different ROM image. Apart from a stray change to the last byte of the ROM, the only difference appears to be a few bytes of speech data. This could well be corruption in my copy; I do actually have it on two independent disc images I ripped when archiving my collection a while back and both are identical, but the error could have occurred back when I first saved it from the original ROM supplied with the hardware. FWIW I've attached a copy.

Code: Select all

$ diff -u <(xxd Watford_Speech.rom) <(xxd Watford_Speech_variant.rom)
--- /dev/fd/63	2018-05-05 18:13:03.822225571 +0100
+++ /dev/fd/62	2018-05-05 18:13:03.822225571 +0100
@@ -215,7 +215,7 @@
 00000d60: 0d0c 23ff 4e45 d70b 1903 ff4e 4fd7 3800  ..#.NE.....NO.8.
 00000d70: 20ff 4e4f d438 0018 0dff 4e55 4d42 45d2   .NO.8....NUMBE.
 00000d80: 3800 0f10 013f 33ff 4f27 434c 4f43 cb35  8....?3.O'CLOC.5
-00000d90: 022a 2d15 ff4f c617 0123 ff4f 46c6 1701  .*-..O...#.OF...
+00000d90: 2a2d 1829 ff4f c617 0123 ff4f 46c6 1701  *-.).O...#.OF...
 00000da0: 28ff 4f4c c435 2d00 21ff 4fd2 17ff 5041  (.OL.5-.!.O...PA
 00000db0: 5241 4d45 5445 d209 1a27 011a 0010 010c  RAMETE...'......
 00000dc0: 020d 0133 ff50 454e 43c5 0907 0b37 37ff  ...3.PENC....77.
@@ -509,4 +509,4 @@
 00001fc0: ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff  ................
 00001fd0: ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff  ................
 00001fe0: ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff  ................
-00001ff0: ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ff69  ...............i
+00001ff0: ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff  ................

[Pernod]

I used to have one of these (well, I still do, *somewhere*!) and I have a slightly different ROM image.

Thanks, I'll take a closer look. If you ever find it I'd appreciate some good photos of the board to verify my assumptions.

[SteveF]

Sure, I'll ask my parents to keep an eye out for it if they're poking around in the roof but please don't hold your breath!

[dv8]

I have a slightly different ROM image.

Thanks for this. It appears that your ROM is the better version.

The allophones for "O'CLOCK" in this ROM are OW KK1 LL AA KK2, in mine they are OW PA2 KK1 LL DD1.

It looks like an intentional patching of an error rather than random corruption.
Perhaps my version of the ROM was an earlier release.

[Pernod]

The allophones for "O'CLOCK" in this ROM are OW KK1 LL AA KK2, in mine they are OW PA2 KK1 LL DD1.

According to the manual at https://acorn.huininga.nl/pub/unsorted/ ... nual-HTML/ the allophones for O'CLOCK are OW PA3 KK1 LL DD1.

[dv8]

According to the manual ... the allophones for O'CLOCK are OW PA3 KK1 LL DD1.

It's clearly wrong though. At some point they must have found the mistake and issued a patched ROM.

(In my original post, PA2 should have been PA3. I forgot that pauses are named PA1..PA5 even though they have allophone numbers 0..4).