I would use one if I had one, but they are not very common here (never seen one). There's a good, partly rom based forth environment for them: http://www.turboforth.net/

Just found this thread. Maybe I'll dig out my old TI-99 and play with the speech synth again. Good to know it's pretty useless at the moment for actual music making.

Hi all, just been thinking about getting a TI-99A speech synth, does anyone know what the speech chip inside it is?  It seems to sound a bit better than a speak'n'spell.

TIA

Spikes

TI 99/4a was my first home computer.  Compared to Apple and Commodore they are a bitch to program, and because of their design, they are slow.

Get a Terminal Emulator cart and a Speech Synthesizer, that gives you text-to-speech powers that you can trigger from BASIC.  The rest is such a pain, even its assembly language (look for Editor/Assembler if you dare) was a bitch and is probably the reason I couldn't grasp it when I was 12.

If you're super daring and have more than one, circuit-bend it.  (You better know what you're doing though.)

XD Brilliant! Actually, I have my Dad's old pascal textbooks, so that should not be a problem.

Awesome, Pascal is what I learned with at university
Maybe I could port some of my old programs.... hahaha want the source to lame university assignment programs? xD

Haha, you don't know the guys I know. Still, coding muscle isn't always the strong point for those guys. I wish I knew some more languages. I'm hacking away in Basic without much effort, and beginning to get into Pascal, since aside from full out assembler it's one of the best languages to work with on the Apple IIgs. Even Orca C isn't as fast as Apple Pascal.

In fact, for a long time all of Apple's system software and toolkits were written in Pascal. Dang.

People who are into retro computing are usually into collecting, and not doing ANYTHING productive with them. At the most, they GAME with them. I hate them, to be honest You are a very special case, let me say.
The only solution for me is the DEMOSCENE, which I am trying to get back to, slowly. You should join, it would flex you muscles much more

I never learned any sort of ASM but I did learn C and went onto basic shit like abstract datatypes.

Well, if you want to "get back into it" you should look into the Retrochallenge. It's like a twice a year retro-computery workout, with prizes at the end! Keeps ya motivated, at any rate. Hanging out with people who are more into retro computers than music also might help, since music folks want to work on music, and not on the code. I'm not much of a music man, if you hadn't guessed, I'm in it for the old hardware.

Of course, this is also coming from a guy who uses the Apple IIgs as his "daily driver" on most days, and shies away from using a new computer whenever he can help it.

I did appreciate the joy of coding when I had tons of free time. Nowadays, it seems pointless for me to do trivial tasks that can be accomplished with easier methods! I guess I'm out of shape

I have a ti99a with music maker...pretty bland sound actually. I don't know what is possible to do with the chip's tone quality, but the cart only lets you program notes. There are no sound editing features...

Hrmf, nobody around here seems to appreciate the joy of coding, I guess. I learned how to code on a system that had little to no editing features, the Apple IIe. I made some pretty huge programs. You DO actually get used to it after a while.

It's the same speech engine inside of a speak and spell.. only you can control everything and make it say anything you want.
i haven't looked at the exact specs in a long time though. I just know that if you are clever with your phonics you can get this puppy to sound
really really awesome. Only downside is you're programming in TI Basic which can get a little annoying after a while. a Copy Paste function would be fantastic! hahaha
there for i recommend emulation when possible.

I need to just sell my TI-99 off as i just can't justify the shelf space anymore.

Isn't the speech module similar to that of the Intellivision?

Yeah mine definitely doesn't get used much but the speech synth is REALLY powerful if you understand how it works.