Thanks for the walk down memory lane! I'm the Eric Cotton that did the GORF cart. I definitely recall triggering the Easter egg with the paddles. Not sure why it didn't work for you...
Hi Eric, I'm glad you found the video! I went through the Gorf code pretty carefully and the paddle registers don't seem to be read at all, and there definitely is code to read the CTRL+Shift+C= key combo to trigger the egg. I can only guess that the paddle code was in a different code revision that didn't make it into the final ROM for the cartridge. Maybe there's another version of the cartridge floating around that nobody's archived yet; that'd be cool.
@@ecottonball I disassembled the C64 version of GORF when making this video, and there is absolutely no reference to the paddle registers anywhere in the code. And in a new video I'm working on (that should be released in a few days) I've disassembled the VIC-20 version of GORF and found where the code checks for the paddles to be turned all the way to the right to reveal a credits screen. VIC-20 GORF is also a joystick game. You're credited in both, and they were presumably made within a short time of each other, so it's perfectly understandable to have mixed up the two versions over the years. Maybe a previous C64 GORF revision even had paddle code in it, but I haven't found that available online anywhere.
Ahhhh awesome! Thanks so much. I've wanted Magic Voice since 1985 abd just scored my very first one. This really helps me know which cartridges I will need to begin with. Have a great day.😊
Reminds me of another paddle-related anomaly. If you plug in a set of paddles while playing Castle Wolfenstein, you can get out of the castle at any time by moving the guy up against an outer castle wall and pushing both paddle fire buttons at the same time. A happy memory from my youth. Great C64 content Robin, thanks!
BTW, some more GORF trivia. While not an Easter egg, per se, the "MJB" in the initial "GORFIAN HALL OF FAME" is a a nod to my maternal grandfather, Mathew J. Bosch.
Great, I had wondered (out loud) who MJB was in the previous video I made that also had some GORF gameplay: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1yHwngHV1dY.html
Another awesome video! I still have my childhood Magic Voice complete with the original box and packing. I have GORF, Wizard of Wor and A Bee C's on cartridge, speaking of which I had no idea that the A Bee C's cartridge was considered rare. Also, cool to see you using a Trooper joystick controller. Last, thank you for sharing the easter eggs. I'll need to try those myself.
My dad got that at a pawn shop in the 80s and I found it in my grandpa’s attic. My dad also has a C128 with a C64 Emulator, and I’m planing to test it out in the future, if we can find a crt tv. I used to have a crt tv since 2017 to 2021. Before Christmas of 2017, I did some basic coding on my dad’s C128 until he stored it to my grandpa’s guest room closet (I call it The South Room because when I look out the window, I face south.). I just want to test out with the voice synthesizer, but it’s late at night as I’m typing this. I wanted to collect vintage electronics and software, but I am just getting started.
As a kid I had Wizard of Wor and a friend of mine had the Magic Voice cartridge. We would trade them back and forth so we can use them together and have it talk during the game.
A disadvantage is that people using the RF output to their TV would need to set up a separate amplifier and speaker for it. Commodore could've used the SID's audio input to mix it with the C64's audio, but that would require a custom cable to be created for and supplied with it.
They actually did that with the Sound Expander, the one with the OPL music chip, and the same housing as the Magic Speech Cartridge. Mine came with a DIN plug for the audio/video port on the C64 and a single tulip connector that connected on the audio out on the Sound Expander so the OPL music was mixed with the SID sounds and thus also hearable over RF
I have a Magic Voice, that I used on RF, and it did come with a little RCA-to-DIN cable to route the audio back in through the SID to the RF modulator.
Kinda reminds me of the utilities that came with the Amiga 500. The very first thing I did on my new A500 was force its voice synth app to sing Fish Heads.
For a 1984 school project, I had built a C64 speech synthesizer that used a General Instrument phoneme chip and the user port. Also wrote a text to speech routine that fed it via the BASIC print# command. It worked better than that thing. Should have marketed it.
Ya know, despite the fact that this uses a word bank instead of phonemes the speech is really remarkable for the time! It has this somewhat natural (again, for the time) cadence. I like it!
"Welcome to the Magic Desk"... sounds like the same exact voice used in Atari Games' arcade Gauntlet and Gauntlet II games. Both of which also used a TI speech synthesis chip. It would be pretty cool to hack the Magic Voice into the C64 versions of those arcade games. Makes me wonder about the current availability of that TI/Toshiba speech synthesis chip because if the available quantities are much greater than what's left of the Votrax chips - after the Apple II scene has scoured the warehouses for those to populate their Mockingboards with - then it would be cool to include a socket on a future Dual SID upgrade board to accommodate it [assuming the sound chip can be easily mapped to]. Then again, maybe rigging up a User Port-to-DB9 Adapter to accommodate an AtariVox without tying up a joystick port might be an easier manner for the retro scene to add speech synthesis to new releases and modded improvements to the classics. Great, now I have "Red Warrior is about to die" playing back in my head...
I never saw the Magic Voice for sale back in the day, but I did have a copy of S.A.M. that I acquired from the elementary school playground Shareware club around 6th grade. I loved playing with that system.
I've always loved Gorf. I think I like the VIC-20 even better, but the 64 version is nice too. Am I the only one who wants the Magic voice to read me directions in the car?
I've always wanted an encoder to convert speech into the type used on Ghostbusters and Beach Head II. It was developed by a company called Electronic Speech Systems (ESS). The speech used up very little memory space. The speech on that cartridge sounds very similair.
Is that the same process used in 'Impossible Mission'? I still have nightmares about Alvin Atombender and his robotic hordes to this day. And his taunts and comments were the first sounds I had ever experienced on a C64 (or indeed any computer). It blew my tiny little mind. Joy!
@@stevethepocket superb! At that age, I'm not sure I read the splash screen - just listened to the voice and looked at the amazing graphics! I'm gonna have to break out the emu now... but thanks for confirming!
It would be interesting to see you reverse-engineer the “A Bee C’s” game to see how it: 1) determines which letter is the correct answer, and 2) determine if the bee is “on” the correct letter. It would also be interesting to make a similar game in which the goal is to move the player (the “spy”) to an object (which has a hidden key) that the game will speak (“move your spy to the computer desk”), and there would be a simple maze and some “office”-type objects (chairs, desks, filing cabinets, waste baskets, etc…) Once the player moves their spy to the correct object, the key (and a one-minute countdown timer) appear on screen, and the game tells the player “move to the door and use the key to escape”. If the player chooses the wrong object, they don’t get the key, and the countdown timer appears. If the player makes it to the door (with the key), the door opens and they make it to the next level (and a 1,000 point bonus), otherwise they lose a life as the guards rush in and arrest the spy once the timer reaches “0” (oh, and the game will have an audible countdown from 10 seconds!) The player will earn an extra life every 5,000 points. Once the player loses all their lives, it’s game over, and the game will end with a screen showing the spy behind bars in jail. 😎
The Commodore used sprites and sprite collision detection for moving the small objects around a background and interact. That is why characters are small. Sprites could be combined to make larger objects but you had a limited number to work with.
Back in the '80s when I was president of the area commodore club and ran a computer shop I sold a lot of Commodores only handful of the magic voices seems to me that if you sequence together the words commodore computers are terrific it sounded exceptionally good
You. Cannot. Fight. Thee. Black. Knight. And. Win. Whoops sorry wrong game! Always impressed by speech apps and hardware from the early 80s. Mind blowing to hear it for the first time back in the day.
I am just guessing here, but I think the reason they did NOT use phonems (or allophones) might be because that would take up more ROM space on the IC. Perhaps the circuit on the IC would have been more complex as well, making it more expensive to make. Or I could be barking up the wrong tree here. 🤔 And yes, "Commodore" should definitely have been word #64.
Cool video! I acquired ones of these (Magic Voice) early on in pandemic days when someone was clearing out their basement and I've been on them hunt for the supported software. Gotta try this Magic Desk I out.
Am glad that clunky magic voice adaptor was never released as hackers with versions of some games have shown that the C64 sid soundchip can play voices on it’s own, if commodore just knew that at the time, they could,ve save them self alooot of plastic and materials to not produce them.
I was confused, but I see below in one of your responses that the newly discovered Magic Desk here is just an upgrade for the voice synth. I've had a copy of Magic Desk on floppy for over 25 years, so this being new found threw me off. Hopefully you'll eventually do a review of Hearsay 1000 for C64.
Yeah, I think I didn't make it clear enough that this prototype is "Magic Desk 1+" (as mentioned on the back of the Magic Voice box). The original "Magic Desk" is pretty common. I haven't managed to get a Hearsay 1000 yet; last I checked they were very pricey on eBay but if I manage to get one, I'll definitely make a video about it.
I wish we lived in a world where Commodore took over the internet and google was some toy kids played with. I grew up with Commodore. They didn't do anything wrong, and they were awesome. Don't be evil - if you have to make that your sworn statement, it means you're trying your hardest not to be.... yet here we are....
So, if the Bee has a different voice that means the cartridge holds a whole new set of speech samples next to the program code. I don't get why they went with sampling at all, with all the limitations of the time. I should view your older videos of phonemic based devices again.
wow, i remember a rumour amongst the kids in school that there was a speaking version of wizard of war, but no one believed it..guess we were all wrong
I thought Gorf and WoW were cartridge-only games? I don't recall seeing disk or tape versions of either game, besides probably some pirated dumped to disk versions.
I remember playing a disk version of Wizard of Wor long ago, before I ever owned a C64, but it was probably a pirated version. Presumably the Magic Voice code would be present in the ROM dump of the game, unless removed or discarded in the process.
are there any easter eggs in the vic 20 version of gorf.. is there a hidden screen of names.. yes and the paddles. or can be displayed with the paddles.
I probably didn't make it clear enough that Commodore did release the original no-voice "Magic Desk" program; this prototype shown was of "Magic Desk 1+" which enhanced the original with Magic Voice support.
Hey one stupid question: Why does the shot sound in Wizard of Wor sometimes shift up in pitch and when that happens, the Exit To Dungeon sound is also shifted up in pitch - and why does this only happen on short board C64s, not on the older long board C64s? (I think I had it happen on one of the later long board C64s with 6581R4AR and 2x4464 RAM instead of 8x4164 RAM, but it's rare)
Interesting, I've never noticed that! I can't think of any reason for the pitch to shift on certain board revisions, unfortunately, but maybe someone else will read your comment and have an answer...
Another great video. I just discovered the "Good poop" Magic voice classics cart myself,, its fun playing Wizard of Wor in a way I never did back in the day, pity that it sounds muffled and hard to hear what the Wizard is saying in game. Still a great release from "Good poop" though. With regards to Magic Desk, when I originally got my C64 back in the 80s it came with a 5 cartridge box set (which included Wizard Of Wor), it also came with a cart called "Magic Desk II", so it seems that application really did get released in some form. It needed disk to save documents and since I only had tape back then couldn't really do anything with it, it also had those other icons on the desk but none of them seemed to work, I tried clicking on them all but only the typewriter worked. Maybe it needed the Magic Voice to make the other icons actually work? I'll don't know, and the instructions had no mention of the voice synthesis so I don;t know if it was needed or if all the other icons were simply disabled. Those carts got sold on with the C64 I had at the time when I upgraded to a C128D, so I'll never know if that was the case,
I imagine that the single word limitation of the SAY command could be overcome with a bit of parsing, such that you would be able to SAY "COMMODORE COMPUTER" with success.
@@customsongmaker That’s just my point, except these homophones are each assigned there own individual ID. e.g. Buy-93, By-131, Bye-153; Hi-154, High-120. This suggests to me that they redundantly stored these phonologs. What I’m suggesting is had they reused the same ID across all versions of each homophone the remaining IDs could have been used for additional words. That said, I concede that it’s entirely possible that the implementation is such that multiple IDs point to the same phonolog rather than each pointing to a unique memory location.
6:20 giving the fact that this cartridge is targeted to include spoken words from BASIC programs it's not a real limitation since the typical usage would be a loop containing a say instruction that loads 1 word contained in READ-DATA statements, thus generating a phrase; in fact taking into accound the cartridge only comes with a fixed predefined number of words you can actually use, it would be normal practice to make a bunch of READ-DATA statements containing the whole vocabulary, sort of "spoken dictionary" and then implement a validation of every phrase you want it to say, to build your own "spoken library" to incorporate in all your speaking BASIC programs
So, wait, the same guy worked on both a Frog thing and a Gorf thing??? Also, I seem to dimly remember that the *arcade* version of Gorf had speech synth - am I remembering right?
Okay... The initial demo of the unit saying individual words was kind of cool, but Voice taunting in Gorf on the C64 almost made my head explode. This is cool. Thanks for another fun video!
I wish you also showed how to change the pitch of the voice, now about wizzard of war, that melody of it reminds me of the first part of the melody in the intro of donkeykong ,so i would be not surprised if nintendo took inspiration from that game😁
Interesting little historical curiosity. I suppose the limited nature of it was just due to trying to keep things simple, though with a major hit to flexibility like that, it doesn't strike me as being terribly useful for anything beyond phone menus.
I think I had this spelling toy 'computer' with a voice very similar to the commodore magic voice when I was a kid, can't remember the name but I think it was made by Vtech.
wow the quality is lower than I remember... I recall an article about it with the engineers - new words can be programmed in machine code/assembly ... the CHIP (i may be wrong here) has all the sounds for English, and you assemble words. Long time since I read that article.. but it was engineers at commodore who programmed the basic vocabulary so they people may be around still. I suppose you could DUMP the magic voice rom, and figure it out.
interesting it has a vocabulary instead of phonemes/allophones, but could you make up most words by stringing together the sounds it already has built in? or at least a close approximation. hmm "ssss six see"?
Great video! I have a Magic Voice, I traded it for a Currah Speech64 for it back in the 80s. I was a little disappointed when I found out that it had a fixed vocabulary... but glad I have ended up with a rather unique piece of hardware.
@@shaanee Not that I recall. Like the Magic Voice, it added commands that allowed you to add speech to your own programs. It used the SP0256-AL2 chip from General Instrument to do the speech synthesis. I remember you had to be creative with the commands. For instance, Michael sounded better entered as Mikel.
@@michaelcarey I had one. BUT it had no documentation of the phonemes. I recall them talking about how they made those words from the phonemes - maybe it needed a cartridge for it to access different memory...& diff sounds. Once the techniques of using the c64 hardware for speech were established it was kinda obselete. the game "BARBIE' by Mattel had just as many if not more words. Magic voice could do a 'Barbie' but not easily..
I don't know all the technical details, but the SID chip was not intended to playback samples. There is a a click sound on the 6581 SID chip when the volume was turned up or down and that was utilized at a high rate of speed to play back samples. It was like a 4 bit, low sample rate I think, so yes, quality would be much worse than any recorded sample.
As crap as the quality is in that GORF hack (though that might be because of lossy conversion being done to an already-low-quality clip?) it's very impressive that they were able to get the computer to play samples without having to freeze the rest of the game. Is this the first time anyone's managed that?
There have been examples of samples playing without freezing the computer, but this may be the first time it's streamed from the cartridge; the EasyFlash cartridge image is a full megabyte and the games themselves are just 16K each or so, so it's a lot of sample data.
