Speech Synthesizer, Now from the Past

If you can't Hack the future then Hack the Past

We all have project scraps and false starts. But, what if your false start was from the 1980s? Well this project began with a purchase from RadioShack in the mid-80's and has finally been completed.

Let The Chips Complete Thier Destiny

This project began in the overflow bin of the Westport Road, Camelot Shopping Center, RadioShack in the early 1980s. I was looking at the offerings and came across the SP0256 Narrator Speech Processor (276-1784) and the CTS256A-AL2 Code-To-Speech Processing Chip (276-1786). These demanded immediate purchase and project completion. I bought the pair and began my first build with them, in 1990.

Why the delay? Well, college and an engineering degree got priority, but I did not forget they were waiting. So, when someone was extolling the speech capability of a MAC at work, I said I could build one (speech synthesizer) for a PC in no time. This was taken as a challenge and I began the project.

Now, the chip pair would require a bit more interfacing work than I bargained for. I settled on using just the SP0256 connected to the parallel port of the PC. The schematic was in the Archer Technical Data sheets, “An Exclusive Radio Shack Service to the Experimenter”.