TMPI vocal synthesizer software on Oric-1, fixed

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Symoon
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TMPI vocal synthesizer software on Oric-1, fixed

Post by Symoon »

Hi,

When I was a kid I bought the (French speaking) TMPI vocal synthesizer, was amazed by the "au clair de la lune" demo, but terribly disappointed as the software (called Synthor) bugged on my Oric-1 when I tried to compose my own sentences (speaking then crashing, while the vocal synthesizer kept doing strange noises).
Later I found the program was running fine on Atmos.

I recently thought I could take a look to see if I could understand the problem. So I spent a while collecting information about the chip (MEA8000), cheked the assembler routines, to finally find... That the bug was in the BASIC software, right here:
10140 NEXT F:POKE BA-SP,#FF:SP=SP+1

Remember there's a bug with POKE command on ROM 1.0, if you poke an hexadecimal value, it just does... Nothing!

So replace the line by
10140 NEXT F:POKE BA-SP,255:SP=SP+1
and there you go.

35 years later, a frustrating thing fixed ;) (still got to try though, fingers crossed)
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Dbug
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Re: TMPI vocal synthesizer software on Oric-1, fixed

Post by Dbug »

Cool!
I actually did not know there was such a bug in the Oric 1 ROM.

Next step, make a PC program that can generate commands to send to the speech synthesizer to make nice sentences :D
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Symoon
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Re: TMPI vocal synthesizer software on Oric-1, fixed

Post by Symoon »

Tested, it's working fine on Oric-1 now ;)
This #FF is used to end the sentence, then stopping the vocal synthesizer. As it was not set on Oric-1, it kept reading memory, thus the strange noises.
Dbug wrote: Fri Mar 11, 2022 8:20 am I actually did not know there was such a bug in the Oric 1 ROM.
I didn't take time to find back articles about it, they do exist somewhere (CEO Mag, Micro'Oric, Théoric, ...) but didn't find anything on the Web. Well, keywords are quite common and give various results.
Maybe a page somewhere with the actual Oric-1 bugs compared to Atmos could be nice, but as usual quite a lot of work. This could also stop the rumor that the tape routines were bugged on ROM 1.0 ^^
Dbug wrote: Next step, make a PC program that can generate commands to send to the speech synthesizer to make nice sentences :D
Mmmmh, since it didn't work on my Oric I almost never used it... I'll leave that to experienced PC programmers and vocal synthesizer experts - there must be plenty of parameters, not really an easy task IMHO.
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iss
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Re: TMPI vocal synthesizer software on Oric-1, fixed

Post by iss »

Cool and congrats for fixing this really annoying POKE bug.
Dbug wrote: Fri Mar 11, 2022 8:20 am Next step, make a PC program that can generate commands to send to the speech synthesizer to make nice sentences :D
Another possibility is to make Oric to command Alexa/Siri to play Oric YM/MYM tunes :lol:
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