Index 0:00 Intro - Star Trek stuff: games, Nitpicker’s Guide 1:23 Trek Technobabble Generator 1:58 BONUS Disk: The C64 version 3:18 About the Currah Speech 64 cartridge 4:53 Using Currah Speech 64 7:15 Modifying the Trek Technobabble Generator for Speech 64 11:05 Allophones: Hawaii, Radiation 16:11 About S.A.M. Software Automatic Mouth 22:03 Modifying the Trek Technobabble Generator for S.A.M.
A funny thing is I actually did something similar on my C128 back in the day. Not with Star Trek technobabble, but I remember playing around with writing programs which could construct random sentences out of words grouped up in the various components that makes up sentences. Although I did have the SAM speech synthesizer software on disk, I didn't make the leap to use it for this. Probably because I was too fond of Basic 7.0 back then. Back in 1999 while hanging out with a friend, the subject somehow fell onto these programs I used to write, which would spit out random and often quite goofy sentences. He asked me if I could write something similar for the PC, so I did. I cannot have used more than 1 or 2 hours on it, so it is nothing fancy. Although it probably is more advanced than the programs I use to write on the C128 and definitely more dynamic. It is composed of 20 small textboxes labelled from "A" to "T" for you to write lists of words into, a control box which contains a list of sentence structures, an output box and finally two "salty" buttons. The idea is to write examples of sentences into the control box and then replace some of the words in your sentence with for instance *A to get a random word from the textbox labelled "A", *B from box "B" and so on. That way you can have several sentence structures in that control box (one per line) and the program will first randomly pick one of those, before going through it and replacing the *A, *B, *C, *D... etc. with a random word from the corresponding boxes. I named the program "LooneyText" and it is written in and old version of Delphi (the current version for that time period). Which means that the first time you fire it up, your Anti-Virus software will most likely start scanning it for what it perceives as potentially malicious code, as Delphi didn't add any source identification, certification and anti-tamper verification to its compilations back then. I have checked, double and triple checked all my older programs with several different Anti-Viral and Anti-Malware applications. So if your Anti-Virus software should find anything it will most likely be a false positive. Here is an URL to it (on my own website), if you guys would like to try it out: www.zhixalom.com/files/MyPrograms/LooneyText.zip The ZIP archive only contains 3 files. The exe-program and 2 example files: "Monty Python.lot" which I seemed to have made back in 2001 and then I just couldn't resist quickly making the Star Trek Technobabble you've just talked about.... enjoy 😉
We are the Borg. Lower your Quantum Interphasic Energy Field and surrender your Spatial Cosmic Confinement Shell. We will add your Trans-Genetic Stream and your Annular Axionic Core to our own. Resistance is futile. 🤖 Great vid!
The lower voice version sounds similar to the speech of the shiny Cylons in the original Battlestar Galactica. Is there a scan of the SAM manual online anywhere? I've had that program since I was a kid but never had the manual, so loading up the "reciter" module was the only way to make it useful.
I think it's funny that the c64 was your go-to system for programming something in 1996, 14 years after its initial release......it had incredible staying power.... I used mine from 85 - 91 (after two years on the Vic 20)... It was ultimately supplanted by my IBM 8086 that I got for college
I think the Currah and one other speech cart whose name I can't recall are the only two devices I can recall that used the audio in functionality of the SID (to pipe through the voice). I can remember how fascinating the first voice synthesizers were, the Speak&Spell, etc. Then it got so prevalent they were putting them in vending machines and photocopiers. Of course, my favorite I think is the speech synth used in War Games, "Do you want to play a game?" :)
That was fun. Man, I remember spending hours making SAM say stuff, even swear like a trooper. I remember being so fascinated by SAM -- I thought the quality of the speech was superb for the time, and for being software based. Great vid!
Funny that it's made in the UK, but says "zee" instead of "zed" when you hit the "z" key. I guess there was a version for the UK and US markets? Or, more likely, it just detects whether your C64 is running at 60hz or 50hz and makes a simple change internally. Sorry, just saw that you mentioned this (with the "say" bug when using the letter "z").
I used SAM quite a bit during my Loadstar years, and even had a vocal announcement at the beginning of the program. On one little amusement, SAM recited the Gettysburg Address. But the text string and the speech string had to be different, which allowed some tweaking of the pronunciation. Thanks for some great demos and all the memories!
I had the Atari 8-bit version of SAM and one of the included demo programs was the Gettysburg address, which has probably resulted in me being one of the few people in the UK who can recite it!
I had buit a speech synthesizer from that same GI chip for a college project in 1984. Connected it via the user port and wrote a ML text to speech routine that set it up as an output device so that I could use the Basic print# command to send it text and it spoke without hogging-up the processor to do it. Worked great. Got an A on the project. It's in my garage somewhere now. I'm sure I lost the disk with my program a long time ago.
If you ever run across the Hearsay 1000 cartridge, pick one up. It allows you to holler commands at the computer (it also talks back as well) and is just the thing for those people complaining about seeing your arms and hands in your videos. :P
I totally forgot about that! I used to own one of those on my C64 and loved it. If I remember, it also had a "female" voice as well, which was funny. A good modification to this program would be to have two separate data lists. One with the words you see on screen, and another where the words would be spelled phonetically where the speech cartridge could properly pronounce the words. I'm also curious why all your data starts at one instead of zero? That just strikes me as a strange thing for a programmer to do.
Good ol' Treknobabble. When your PLA goes kaput, is it because of a metaphasic temporal anomaly? Rumors are that a replacement somebody is working on will contain a FTL nanoprocessor. (Sorry, haven't watched Star Trek in any quantity in a very long time, and am horribly out of practice.) Those Phil Farrand books were great fun.
For the Currah, for "Radiation" you could've used - SAY "[R(AY)(DD)(EE)(AY)(SHUN)". Just think phonetically. I had the same cartridge long ago and had a lot of fun with it. I had it saying things rather well using phonetics. Very fond memories of that time.
Ack!! Vol.2?! Any diehard Nitpicker's fan knows that's the inferior Vol.. Ok, it had the T.T.G., so that's worth it at least. I love those books. Still have them around somewhere, although I haven't looked at them in years. Great episode.
I will admit i wore an eye patch back in the day of the C64, come on with the invention of the twin tape deck life was good. And SAM was fun and he swore like a pirate too.
haha yes that was great for that time on the 64, but when I had my Amiga it was much easier to let it speak We hat much fun on CB :D But we had to play with the strings, as it was not able to speak German. That came many years later to change it in the Prefs
I recall this was only available for commodore machines it also was on the Spectrum home computers but it worked better on Amiga's of course I am sure there was something about the Sam software I believe it was used in a film or possibly TV show to give a voice to a computer like in Tron or something like that and I believe there was a music side to Sam a further bit of Software for music creation a bit basic though I think it eventually had a pc version in early Windows versions?
Does anyone know how to hook up this Currah cartridge? It has a wire to plug it into the video port but I am using that for my monitor. I did try to "INIT" it blindly but I could not hear it doing anything. I don't have a way to plug it into the composite right now. Maybe I need some kind of splitter cable or something? I was hoping to try out this cartridge to use it in my own programs but I might have to use SAM instead.
Yeah, mine has a splitter / Y-adapter, I show it around 3:50 in this video. You'll need that, or some other compatible cable to get the audio out of the cartridge.
That's all well and good; though how did you get the 128D to boot the primary heisenfram terminal? Unless the isopalavial interface receives two bilateral kelilactirals, the Ontaian manifold stays at 5000 KRGs, or thereabouts -- and any Commodore enthusiast worth his salt knows that unlike a Firomactal drive, the 1541-II cannot deliver that much. Nevertheless, the 128D is an impressive machine; and unlike games, it has a keyboard.
@@Okurka. Yeah, I know (elementary mistake & too lazy to edit). I must have been distracted by the longing I have for the 1541-II that I had as a kid. Which of course is not to say that the 1571 would have had the bilateral kelilactirals.
Yes, the manual includes instructions on how to use SAM in assembly. It could be used in a game too, yes, though I'm not sure about the copyright legalities of it if someone had tried to use it in a commercial game. Presumably nothing to worry about today though :)
So weird to me that you have a C-128 and you use it in C-64 mode. To my mind that's always been a backwards compatibility mode to be entered only when necessary for running programs written for the 64. If you're fiddling around in BASIC, why would you not use the better BASIC? which also gets you the numeric keypad, all the fancy ESC sequences in the screen editor, RENUMBER, DLOAD/DSAVE/BLOAD, the built-in MONITOR (which is admittedly not as nice as the Super Snapshot cartridge...) :)
From memory, the Star Trek program is one I wrote on my C-64 in 1994 (I don't think I owned a C128 yet?), and in this video I add speech synthesis in the form of S.A.M. and Currah, both of which are C64-only programs. So it doesn't seem weird to me that I would use C-64 mode when I'm adding C-64 speech synthesis to a C-64 program...
@@8_Bit Fair enough! That just seems like a common setup in your videos, which is more what I was remarking on. But then, I skipped from the VIC to the 128 and never used C64s or C64 mode much at all, so my perspective is undoubtedly biased; I'm more fluent in C-128 mode, which given the relative sales numbers is probably fairly uncommon among Commodore enthusiasts...
Cool video with info I needed! I just got my first speech cartridge just before MGC... a R.I.S.T. Inc. comTalker 64. I now realize it's just a rebranded Currah cartridge! It's amazing that S.A.M. has so many more options than a dedicated cartridge. I did a S.A.M. project in 2015 - a "SAM-Siri Assistant". It's on Disk A here: csdb.dk/release/?id=141377&show=hidden#hidden
3:58 Are you sure it's a "Y cable" or does the voice synthesizer send its output to the Audio-In pin of the AV port and SID chip? 8:18 One factoid about BASIC is that if a string expression references only one string variable or literal, then that value will be used directly without creating a new string and potentially triggering a garbage collection. The new calculation of S$ in line 185 is the only place in your program that can trigger a garbage collection after initialization. (Not that it would take long with so few string values.) 9:03 From what I've read, RND(1) returns a "better" stream of random numbers than RND(0), which might be restricted to a small range of actual values with a pattern. The best plan is to seed the random number generator with a negative number like or RND(-TI*RND(0)) and then use RND(1) to get a better distribution that's different each time. 9:15 A program like this isn't really a good place for confusing optimizations, since it doesn't have any performance problems. 10:00 If the "Star Trek" actors had problems pronouncing these words, a simple text-to-speech system from the 1980s is going to have even more problems. The only one it does okay is "Interphasic warp stream". To make this work well, you'd need two versions of each word, one in English and one spelled out pho-e-net-ic-al-ly ( ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-74kIGb1b10U.html ). 13:15 Can't you put the part of the string it's already pronouncing correctly outside of the square brackets, "RAD[(EE)]ATION"? 17:23 SAM also sounds more like Stephen Hawking. Since SAM is disk-based, its reciter code can use a lot more space than a cartridge has.
Treknobabble - always hated it. I'm a huge TOS fan, but could never get into TNG. They'd all meander around for 45 minutes and then someone would say Treknobabble magic words about "inverting the warp core phase polarity" or "oscillating the transporter axolotl" and presto, they were out of danger. No real drama like with TOS.
TNG had a great deal of drama. Technobabble was an element to sell the sci-fi aspect, not solve all of the problems. The most memorable episodes were about using cleverness and professionalism resolve tense situations. Anyone who thinks TNG was just about big fake words (or worse, space battles) has never really watched TNG.
