S.A.M   was ported to C  https://github.com/s-macke/SAM   by Sebastian Macke. on line test version is at   http://simulationcorner.net/index.php?page=sam

What is SAM?

Sam is a very small Text-To-Speech (TTS) program written in C, that runs on most popular platforms. It is an adaption to C of the speech software SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) for the Commodore C64 published in the year 1982 by Don't Ask Software (now SoftVoice, Inc.). It includes a Text-To-Phoneme converter called reciter and a Phoneme-To-Speech routine for the final output. It is so small that it will work also on embedded computers. On my computer it takes less than 39KB (much smaller on embedded devices as the executable-overhead is not necessary) of disk space and is a fully stand alone program. For immediate output it uses the SDL-library, otherwise it can save .wav files.

Windows binary  http://simulationcorner.net/SAM/sam_windows.zip

I have the Kerberos Midi cartridge but the software wont respond at all to my Keyboard, and pressing the
F8 key goes into a setup menu, I have tried all settings in there and still no sound from my keyboard.

Was the tracker called Sid Tracker (Above issue)?
I was told that  maybe when this was flashed into the cartridge Rom may not have programmed all the way?

I had to find a Mid interface for:  USB(PC interface) to Midi Din IN and OUT. 
connect the Midi out to the Midi IN on the Kerberos cartridge.
Frank Buss has both a PC or Macintosh Application for flashing any programs, my question is does the program have to be
converted into a binary file, or will any other filetype work? (I don't know much about Flash Rom's is why I ask).
So Frank suggested this as a possible solution to make my Kerberos work with my keyboard.

Are there any other C=64 Midi sequencers out there, I would like to try something different than the German version if possible and if its
not copyrighted.

Thanks,

traymond

The Covox Voice Master has a head set and a microphone to record a voice possibly other stuff.

traymond

The software is in basic and you have to play in each musical part for each SID 'voice' - then you have to record expression parts for the speech and also sequence the notes for the 'singing'. Damn HORRIBLE interface but I think it was done in 1983.

Also the animated face can be fully customised and looks suspiciously like David Byrne of Talking Heads.

Here is one of the example songs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zvTmC7mzb4

Another example song - https://vimeo.com/150045715

Here is me messing with the preset "bicycle built for two" pre-loaded so you can trigger words at any chosen pitch - https://vimeo.com/135723824

Think of it as "Vectorised voice" system which operates on two of the sid channels and defies what a C64 can do.  The irony is that it takes a multi processor PC ages to actually generate the data before it hits the C64!  (good old brute force)  I'm talking to ALIH about actually doing a recording in a studio with proper mics and compressors and see how good we can get it to sound:

In his notes:
( see: http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id= … show=notes )

"The music is a cover of Hoobastank's "My Turn" from the album For(n)ever. ...  Speech sounds on a c64 - one channel is the carrier, which is the frequency of the speaking voice, and one is the modulator, which is a ring modulation, sync, or both. If you're Agemixer, filter banks are also involved .  In any case, the codec used here works kind of like that. I use a phase vocoder (that I suspect has an occasional bug!) to get the base pitch of the tone, and then try different modulation frequences until I find the closest match (based on the magnatude portion of an FFT calculation). If people are interested, I will release this tool at some point.

I have a parameter in that which controls how often the sid is updated. I did 25fps to make everything fit into ram. .... So in order to get intelligable output, I ended up dealing with five parameters - two voice frequencies of eight bits each, two volumes of four bits each, a waveform of three bits ($11,$21,$41,$81) for the carrier channel and a modulation type of two bits (1 bit ring, 1 bit sync) for the modulator channel. This gets compressed into four bytes per updated frame. The instrumental part of the song was done in a single track in ninjatracker 1.02 (I think 1.02), then patched the player to only play a sid channel, mostly because the rotozoom part relies on a music player of no more than 12 rasterlines to achieve 50fps. Ninja takes 4 rasterlines, and voice player takes 7. There really is no excuse for it taking 7 rasterlines other than some shitty, shitty code on my part.

The replayer code has a couple of major points of shittiness, the most obvious one being the classic problem for anyone who does sid programming - you'll notice that I said that I needed to set two volumes.... so obviously you can't fucking do that . Quick sid theory lesson for those not initiated: there is a "feature" in the sid where you can change teh sustain _down_, but not _up_ without a retrigger. You can do this after having the ADSR at zero for three cycles or so (might have been five, i forget now), which is pretty inaudable. But, the fastest attack is 12ms or so, which is half a frame, whcih causes a nice audable click. I originally had the filters turned on to attempt to deal with that, but I actually _forgot_ to turn them back on after turning them off for testing reasons.  But net result is that you end up with something that is vaugely in the right direction of there, but obviously not acutally totally brilliant, due to a combination of bugs and stupidity on my part. But I still thought it sounded cool, and some of the other people I showed it to thought that it sounded cool, and besides, I was already committed . I think it's one of those like/hate things again.

But back on topic, once I've turned the sample data into sid data, i cut it up into blocks and stream it from the disk into a 4k ring buffer from the loader routine. So you end up with code that looks like:

loadPart:
while ringBuffer needs data:
loadMusic
loadPart
while ringBuffer needs data:
loadMusic

in an effort to try and keep that buffer nice and full. And it mostly works... i mean, for obviously small values of "works". But it also puts some stress on the loading times, which is not something I considered until I wrote the ringbuffer code at 5am on satuday morning, and realised that all of my loading times doubled."

So there we go - something of a break though in speech synth on C64 ;-)  From here in Australia!

And then there's for example http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=40227 & http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=88354 where you can control some stuff. The best one in this category is probably http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=44096

Would be great to hear your friend's work!