zxsp 0.8.pre26: hE(ll)(oo) k(ee)(OO)

Got it?

"Hello Kio !"

Yeah, my Spectrum speaks.

Inspector for the Currah µSpeech digital speech unit

Thanks to the work of Joe Zbiciak and Frank Palazzolo, who had reverse engineered the SP0256 speech processor, i was able to implement an emulation of this chip and then of the Currah µSpeech interface in zxsp.
The SP0256-AL2 contains a cascade of six 2-pole filters, a rom with filter coefficients for British/American language and a micro sequencer, which feeds these values into the filter coefficients. All digital. The output is an 8 bit PWM.

Despite of the very comprehensive informations about the SP0256 chip on their website there were still some bits not clear to me. I filled in the gaps by own tests and looking at what other people did. (not too many of them…) And i emulated the double RC filter after the PWM output. Yeah!

I added an option to switch between the original 8 bit sound and the unrestricted approx. 14 bit output, but i can't hear any difference. :-)

At the bottom of the inspector widget i added a scroller which displays the spoken allophones.

Though most allophones are spoken as expected, i believe some are emulated wrong, e.g. "1" and "Y" sound a little bit like a "bass bump" and "?", spoken as "kw(ee)r(ee)", sounds more like "kneenee". But there is little i can do about this.

I found that there are three pairs of allophone tokens in the µSpeech unit which refer to the same allophone: "(ck)" and "(gg)" which refer to KK2, "(oo)" and "(eau)" for OW and "(aa)" and "(ay)" for allophone EY. On the other side, tokens for two allophones are missing: DH2 and GG2. Given the fact, that "CLEAR" and "CLS" are both spoken as "CLEAR", the µSpeech seemed to be released a little bit fast these days.

Technically the Currah µSpeech isn't a Z80 peripheral. It's more like a 6502 add-on. It uses memory-mapped i/o! I had to extend my Z80 emulation to handle that sort of things…

Final problem was the rom switching for this little beast: It toggle's between it's 2k rom and the ZX Spectrum's internal rom when a RST7, that is, when the regular timer interrupt is executed. Actually, the way i handled rom switching up to now could not handle this: It detected an opcode fetch at address 0x0038 in one rom, switched the rom and restarted the CPU at this address. Then it detected an opcode fetch at address 0x0038 in the other rom, switched the rom and restarted the CPU at this address. And so forth.


A final word about the Blog Editor: It's getting worse every day i write my next post. It's really so bad now, that i write my blog post in a text editor on my Mac and copy&paste it into this editor.

zxsp 0.8.0pre25: 4.75 cm/s

Hello,

long time not seen…

This release brings bug fixes, improved tape handling and the ability to load C sources.

Fixed bugs

(some are only intermediate bugs, not actually present in pre24)

• Kempston mouse interface: Mouse grabbing & tracking did no longer work in Qt 5.x
• Investigated and fixed audio interrupt drop-outs (thanks, Apple!)
• Investigated and fixed paintEvent() overpainting child widgets in Qt 5.4 (thanks, Qt!)
• Investigated regular unusually long interrupt runtime: WLAN-internet bridge! (thanks, Apple!)
• Instand loading crashed at end of tape if tape was "running"
• Inves could not load from tape recorder
• Crash when accessing beyond allocated tracks of floppy, e.g. on empty side
• Save tape utterly broken, crashed in CSW buffer decoding

Tape recorder

Load and save tape is now fully supported in all models.
Spectrum-type machines can load and save .tap, and .tzx.
ZX80 machines can load and save .o, .80 and .tzx.
ZX81 machines can load and save .p, .81, .p81 and .tzx.
The Jupiter Ace can load and save .tap and .tzx.

Additionally all models can load from real audio files like .wav and .aiff, but saving to audio file is not yet supported. E.g. you can insert a .wav file in the tape recorder and choose "save as" from the context menu and save it to a .tzx file.

All models can instant-load and instant-save tapes, if the rom routines are used. Loading tape files like a snapshot, e.g. by double clicking or by reload recent file, will set the tape recorder to instant-load, so, unless custom loading routines are used, loading a tape file is instantaneous.

While playing tapes now the typical sound is audible, which was missing for a while.

Record and play back from your Mac's audio-in and audio-out device is not yet fully supported. For recording i recommend to record the audio file with Audacity, but i have not yet tested whether it suffers from dropped audio interrupts, as zxsp did and, as far i can tell, even iTunes does (for playing). For playing the tape recorder of any machine can be used, though the audio level is currently a little bit low, because i didn't want to annoy you too much every time you load a tape. :-) Of course for playing real audio files any audio program can be used as well. ;-)

Recording your old tapes into .tap or .tzx files is now very easy: Just insert the audio file into the tape recorder and choose "save as" from the context menu to save it in another format.

Load assembler and C source files

Assembler source files are assembled using a built-in version of zasm, and the result, whatever it is, is loaded. zasm supports .sna, .z80, .o, .p and .tap files.

zxsp comes with a built-in executable of sdcc, a multi-target C compiler. Take a look at the zasm manual to see how to include C source files.