@@The8BitGuy I had a cassette recorder that would play in reverse. I think it was Sony and the feature was called slow rewind if I recall! I also used it for Knight Rider episode Knightmares which had a creepy hologram saying what was supposedly an address backwards. When I reversed it, it was indeed very similar to the address!
@@The8BitGuy I had a weekend job at a radio station at the time, so I just dubbed the audio off onto reel-to-reel down at the station, then flipped the tape over so it played backwards :)
I was obsessed with this stuff when I was a kid, of course I wanted the computer to speak and listen to me. I had saved and saved and got a voicemaster for c64, hearsay 1000 and later the PC version of the voicemaster. I had hours of fun... unfortunate it took about 30 years for them to talk back a little more intelligently. Great video!
When Cortana and Siri came out the magic was already gone for me because I knew a bit how they worked but don't worry it does not stop me to talk to Siri when I'm bored. Also back than when I found out I could get Cortana on Android I did talk to her when I was home alone.
The person who made the Voice Harp Recorder program (the humming one), Donald X. Vaccarino, is also the board game designer behind the massively popular game Dominion. It was neat to see his name in the credits at 13:23. He also wrote the manual: "I originally wrote a funny manual for that program. And they laughed and laughed but said, well obviously this joke and this joke have got to go. So I edited them out and made whatever other changes and they proofread it again and said, oh hey we can't really have this joke or this joke. After four or fives passes of this I went through and removed all of the jokes. They were sad and the manual was done."
@@JavaJack59 I immediately noticed it too and rewinded the video to make sure I saw it right. Really cool, especially because Kingdom Builder is currently my favourite board game.
Funny thing is, you don't need any of this crap. I had a program from Compute or Ahoy that would allow you to record something on a cassette and then digitize it through the cassette port by just playing it in the datasette.
Oh wow! Super cool! I miss more music stuff like this! Great demo of these rare products! Also ur daughter has an awesome voice and it was cool seeing her for the first time!
Haha, I came here to comment the same thing. I seem to remember a panel quiz show on BBC Radio 4 where he'd sing a song backwards, and the other contestants had to work out what the song was.
There was also an episode of the GI Joe cartoon from the Eighties where Destro said a line backwards - when i reversed it, it said something like: "Anybody who took the time to reverse this is a real dweeb." LOL. Thanks for the video 8-Bit Guy. :)
I bought this (voice Master, C64) for my hard earned money as a teenager in the mid 80's. It was very cool, I still have audio recordings of people from back then. I still got it. Mine is an aluminium box instead of plastic.
My boyfriend is a huge fan of Red Dwarf, and he's gotten me into it as well. I did realise that the stuff being said in "Backwards" would probably be real sentences, but I've actually never tried reversing it myself. It was fun to hear that particular little clip :)
Just a few years ago I left a job at a warehouse where I used a headset voice-recognition picking system. Whatever I used wasn't much improved over what was used in the 80's! Worst part of that system was when the voice recognition got confused and the machine would start screaming gibberish at 100 decibels. How nice of the developers to leave the debug system enabled in the field release and blast diagnostics right into my ear at full volume.
Watching 8-Bit Guy before sleeping, putting headphones in, arranging blanked and pillow nicely, and being eager to enjoy great content, all of a sudden I hear 3 knocks, I rip out my headphones, jump up from bed, my heartbeat went up a few notches and looking around to what caused this. While I was looking at the door, checking if anything fell down, running through every room to see what might have caused the sound, I realized it could also be the video... ( 0:58 ) So I just wanted to thank you for my late night cardio, my heart works :D 10/10 would recommend as personal trainer. :D (just wanted to share this funny story, no critique)
Had exactly the same experience of sampling and reversing the Red Dwarf clips on our Amiga. The hardware was a Sound Express (parallel port), and I think we blew the right channel trying to plug it into the phone line. Glory Days!
@@johndododoe1411 It kinda does, yeah. It uses technology called Linear Predictive Coding which basically models how speech is generated in the human vocal tract.
Absolutely awesome episode! I've always been fascinated by these ancient sound digitizers, never had the chance to mock around with 'em when i was a kid...Thank you for this retro thrill, dude! 👍
On my Acorn Atom (a 1979 British 6502-based computer, the direct forerunner of the BBC Micro), a short type-in program was published that let you digitise a few seconds of audio via the cassette port, so you could plug in a microphone instead of the tape deck and record your own voice. The audio was digitised into the 6K available just above screen memory. The quality was pretty awful, you could just make out your voice under a sea of noise, but it was still mind-blowing at the time.
I had the same kind of program (a short listing called dazzler in a magazine ) on m'y Amstrad CPC 6128, I just had to buy a standard din cable to make it works. The Amstrad 464 would do it with its integrated tape device direcly.
There was an Apple II program, MegaMusic, that did something like that. too. I was always amazed at the playback. Also the digitizer shown in this video is specifically for the //c. The port is not a "dumb" port - it has firmware for use with mice, so I wondered if that played a role.
I found this channel because of 8-Bit Keys and I miss seeing a new video pop up on a keyboard I hadn't heard of 😭🙏 Still love all the videos, and I'm glad to see any video of 8-Bit Guy's on my feed. Keep it up!
19:59 I had almost the same idea as a kid, but with an inverted color image that I saw in a magazine. I scanned this and was happy when I applied the "inverse color" option and the original colors showed up.
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH "BEST.FURDICH.FUN" > SATISFY.BABY < tricks I do not know Megan: "Hotter" Hopi: "Sweeter" Joonie: "Cooler" Yoongi: "Butter So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today. Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım '' Erinder: '' Sezimdüü '' Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak '' Dene: '' Muzdak '' Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis. Aç köz arstan Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon. Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan. Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾 They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising 💗❤💌💘
If you want something that samples properly and has the look and feel of an 80's computer then a Roland S50/330/550/7XX is a must, the S50/550/330 is 12bit and the 7xx are 16bit. The 12bit line come with a monitor port (DIGITAL RGB (that can be easily converted to SCART and monochrome composite)as standard and can even be controlled with an MSX mouse.
There is a kind of having fun with the samplers and reversed sound that many people came up on their own: record a phrase, reverse it, listen to it, and try to mimick it with your voice as close as possible on another record, then reverse that. The result often sound pretty fun.
When my family finally got a current computer with built-in sound capabilities in the early 2000s, I came up with a game with Windows Sound Recorder. A second person leaves the room, you record something and reverse it, and they come back in. Then you play them the reversed recording, and they record their best attempt at imitating the reversal. Then you reverse that and they try to guess what the original phrase was.
Great video. I was also fascinated by the red dwarf episode back in the day. I recorded it onto cassette and played it in reverse to find out what was being said. Many thanks.
Absolutely fabulous; the amount of time that I used, dooling in SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) on C64 means, that I'd have been using even longer on mucking around with recordings. The Doctor Who and Red Dwarf findings is the cherry on top.
I wasn't actually expecting a Red Dwarf reference today, but I am glad there was. Oh, one thing you might find amusing is that over here in the UK, on the DVD release of Backwards, one of the DVD extras was the entire episode of Backwards in reverse.
I was into UV etching my own PCB designs in those days & with a few friends that were also into electronics we built several different mono audio samplers for the C64 using different ADC ICs before settling on a design we were happy with. We ended up with two versions, one that cost about £10 that gave pretty decent results and one for about £35 that was built inside cheap Tandy/Radio Shack two channel audio mixer units. The manager of our local Radio Shack store eventually asked what we were doing with them when we bought all the two channel mixers they had in stock and asked when they would get more. It turned out the manager and a couple of the staff also had C64s and bought 3 samplers from us ! We gave them a 'discount' in the hope we might get the next batch we bought at a lower price, I ended up getting staff discount on a whole bunch of stuff from that store. Oh what Fun!
That Red Dwarf clip at the end got me! I've seen that episode 100 times and I never even considered reversing the audio! That was absolutely classic! Thank you so much for that! Lol!
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH "BEST.FURDICH.FUN" > SATISFY.BABY < tricks I do not know Megan: "Hotter" Hopi: "Sweeter" Joonie: "Cooler" Yoongi: "Butter So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today. Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım '' Erinder: '' Sezimdüü '' Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak '' Dene: '' Muzdak '' Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis. Aç köz arstan Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon. Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan. Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾 They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising 💗❤💌💘
I remember reversing the audio on my Mum's 386SX with a SoundBlaster. I had recorded the episode the night before on an Amstrad dual deck VHS recorder, used a dictaphone to record from the TV speaker and plugged that into the audio-in on the sound card. I can still quote that whole conversation to this day 😁
I was born in 1989, so this stuff is all new to me. It's amazing how much we take these things for granted now because everything is integrated on the motherboard. This is why I love this channel though. Learning about all the old, obsolete tech, really makes me appreciate my computer more.
I wish I had played with sound more on my C64. Back in the day. The coolest thing I ever did with sound was to activate a keychain. I had a keychain that would say "I love you" when you whistled at the right pitch. I could never whistle so I wrote a C64 program to cycle thru all the sound frequencies until I found the range that would work. When I played the sound on the C64 the keychain would do its thing. My parents and friends were VERY impressed. Ah the good old days.
I was 1 of 5 winners of Micro Master Holland, a national computer programming contest, back in 1986. Won a trip to Disney World, with my Sound Sampler 64, same name but way better sampler program witten in assembler using all 64kb, it had 8 bit A/D on the cartridge port and 8 bit D/A on the printerport. Never new its existence until recently. I sold only 15 of them. I must have the source diskettes somewhere, must search again. Thank you for your demonstration.
Heck yea. Used to go dumpster diving back with a buddy in the 90s at a couple places that would throw away a lot of old electronics from the 80s at the time and came across a DECtalk Express. Although we discovered it after its time, it was still awesome to play with and made me appreciate the innovation of sound cards.
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH "BEST.FURDICH.FUN" > SATISFY.BABY < tricks I do not know Megan: "Hotter" Hopi: "Sweeter" Joonie: "Cooler" Yoongi: "Butter So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today. Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım '' Erinder: '' Sezimdüü '' Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak '' Dene: '' Muzdak '' Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis. Aç köz arstan Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon. Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan. Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾 They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising 💗❤💌💘
Man that is just sad. As an actual blind person who utilized a DECtalk express in order to be able to use computers, I paid about $500 for one in The year 2000, and I was getting a good deal given what they were going for in the blind community at the time. Hearing that somebody was throwing them out in the 90s just makes me cringe. 😂
@@FriendlyNeighborhoodNitpicker that is sad indeed! I guess the people had no idea what it actually did! I found it on a pile of token ring network cards. Which I also rescued at the time haha. Ahhh. I’m amazed it cost that much!
The DECtalk devices were amazing for their time. I was supporting all kinds of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer and networking systems at the time, got to play with one briefly. As I recall, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used them for the voice reporting on the special weather radio broadcasting on several special frequencies like 162.550 KHz. It hasn't been that many years ago that they switched to newer synthesized voices.
Thank you for sharing this. Older technology - sound and video cards in particular - get my attention and are an interesting topic to dig into. And the intro music to your channel is fantastic! Take care!
The Intellivision had an expansion module called the Intellivoice that gave digital playback of speech samples for certain games, such as "B-17 Bomber."
You da man! Thanks for the awesome vid! Knowledge drop from all this stuff that I was too young to be in to back in the day is much appreciated... One of my fave episodes of Red Dwarf BTW!
I reversed clips from that episode of Red Dwarf, it felt like the actor were talking to me & I was in wondrous amazement & I loved it!😊 I predicted you would mention the Red Dwarf episode when you were talking about the 70's episode of Doctor Who.
11:20 "The question is: how well does it work?" * The computer proceeds spamming random notes when David is silent * Me: I'd say it works pretty well 👍
Covox also published a demo disk to show off their tech -- at least the parts that could work without actually having the hardware. It included things like a "talking calculator" and "Voice Master BASIC" for writing programs that dealt with samples. It works well in an emulator. I never had the Covox hardware as a kid, but I did have fun with the demo disk, especially the BASIC example where it repeated the last syllable of "Voice Master" as an echo effect. I found it impressive, and the sound was burned into my brain enough that while watching your video 36 years later, whenever it said "Voice Master" I kept expecting to hear "Voice Masterterterterterter!" :)
I used the ZX Spectrum's mic socket for sampling in the mid 80's. It sounded decent, I would record chunks of songs into memory then save them to Microdrive. I could then load the chunks back in to play the full song. a 3 min track would be about 80K.
I was thinking about the Red Dwarf episode as you were talking about Dr Who. Being a big RD fan, and very much aware of Arthur Smith's message, I had a good chuckle to myself when you said that you actually reversed his little insult!! Nice one :o)
I can't remember which machine I had (Spectrum 128K or Atari STE maybe), but I remember reversing the Red Dwarf episode and also being impressed. I remembered it the moment you spoke about Dr Who!
After suffering through overly long, complicated youtube video openings, I have to compliment you on your perfectly made intro. It's got all the info you need to know what's going to be happening, and it's just the right length - 10 seconds. Thanks for not wasting my time.
Love your daughters voice! I owned the technosound sampler for the Amiga and loved playing with that. There were several sampler software programs out there that could distort your voice like transposing up and down, dalek robot sound etc.
There is a system that came with a package called Softspeak which was on all of the PC Plus Superdiscs which said "Welcome to the PC Plus Superdisc" and also had the digitizer to allow you to create the sound files which could be turned into self playing files which played through the PC speaker.
I used to want one of these so bad! It's very interesting to see their capabilities in hindsight of current technologies. Thanks for the continuing trip down nostalgia lane!
The C64 datasette actually was a 1bit sound digitizer. A magazine back in the day had a small listing that allowed you to sample snippets from cassette tapes. There even was a diagram on where on the datasette's PCD to solder two leads so you could attach an external microphone. Lots of fun.
The Apple ][e cassette input worked the same way. I typed in a program from Nibble magazine to record audio. I hooked up a microphone, recorded a bunch of phonemes, and made a crude text to speech synthesizer. If you ever played Castle Wolfenstein 2 on the Apple, it had some speech recorded in this way. 1 bit audio!
I think I had that! I also typed in a really, really long listing that allowed you to record and play back what was coming through. Basically all it did was record the change in volume coming through the tape head and then change the volume register up and down on playback.
@@cpm1003 I never saw that program in Nibble magazine, but I wrote my own program to record 1 bit audio using the cassette input. It sampled the input every 10 clock cycles. The built-in speaker could only be toggled on and off, so it too was essentially 1 bit audio. I think the voice recordings in Castle Wolfenstein were highly compressed so they did not sound so well. I got much better results with my own program. There was a speech synthesizer program for the Apple ][ computers called SAM, so I never thought of creating my own.
Thanks for this. I remember lusting after this thing (I'm pretty sure they advertised a VIC-20 model). I remember mentally computing how many days of delivering newspapers it would take to get it, and how cool it would be to talk to my computer.. but the VoiceMaster retailed for more than $100, too rich for my blood back then. Thank goodness I didn't; I would have been a bit heartbroken. But it's great to finally see what it was!
I remember when I got one for my amiga 500 back in the day to use with octamed. We were impressed back then with such things. How simple it seems now 😂
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH "BEST.FURDICH.FUN" > SATISFY.BABY < tricks I do not know Megan: "Hotter" Hopi: "Sweeter" Joonie: "Cooler" Yoongi: "Butter So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today. Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım '' Erinder: '' Sezimdüü '' Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak '' Dene: '' Muzdak '' Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis. Aç köz arstan Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon. Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan. Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾 They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising 💗❤💌💘
I got my first audio digitizer on my Commodore Amiga too in the 80s and it was really good! Used it for fun and to record sounds for public performances, like a Patch the Pirate children's musical at our church. The Amiga did a great job of multitasking the playback of the sound samples, so I could have crickets playing back multiple times with each mouse click, over both the left and right channels of the auditorium's sound system which made it sound so real! The kids and the parents loved the effects it added! PS. Love Red Dwarf! Was hilarious seeing the lady un-eat the hotdog and you being the first one in the states to hear what they were actually saying!
I was already thinking strongly of the Amiga when I went into the local computer shop. They had a disc copy program that someone had hacked to play the G&S Pirates of Penzance song whenever you started the copier - "Yo, ho, yo, ho, a pirate's life for me!" Played with very good fidelity through some OK speakers at the shop, it may have been the moment I decided to get that computer.
Holy crap! The Commodore Composer was programmed by Donald Vaccarino. The game designer of Dominion, the first ever deck building game. How weird is that?
Considering how often Siri banjaxxes what I ask her when I'm in the car that voice recognition isn't half bad: I would no doubt have been absolutely blown away by it in 1985. Great video, and loved the Red Dwarf clip - absolutely perfect!
I love that you started with Ghostbusters and Impossible Mission. We had both those games for our C64 as well as Kennedy Approach, which my father played a lot of. That was a air traffic control simulator where the game would use speech synthesis to repeat back your commands like a controller speaking to the aircraft.
I was so impressed with the voice clips in Impossible Mission and Ghostbusters back in the 80s. I had experimented with programming musical notes on the C64 and just assumed it was a very complicated form of that, somehow! 😂
Just seeing that monitor up close brings back a flood of memories. Thousands of hours I spent in 8th grade changing the code for an Amiga 500 piece of bbs software (written in basic) to display ANSI graphics. Petra BBS.
So cool seeing a kalimba out of nowhere. What a great instrument, easy to learn, cheap and can be hold like a gamepad. Tetris theme here i go again... :D
@@ShaunDreclin There were some rubber fingercaps/tips provided... but i don't really use them and after a while your thumbs get used to it... or maybe i'm just not playing as loud ^^
This really brings back memories for me. I had a Commodore 64 and 128 as a kid. I got the Covox Voice Master and played around with it lot. I did a project recording me saying "Hi there" which is the very beginning of "Big Time" by Peter Gabriel. I recall being able to edit the waveform to try to emulate the faint ring in the Gabriel song.
After hearing the Covox Voicemaster, it reminded me of the railroad defect detectors that broadcasted over the air to alert of any axle over temps or dragging equipment. This makes me wonder if the companies that built them used the same chips that were in the Convex. This may not be too much of a stretch since companies like to use more off-the-shelf components to build their products.
Glad to see more stuff coming from you! Honestly, my favorite is the SFX Sound Sampler. It's got the best audio quality, and it doesn't have a bunch of useless gimmick demos.
These devices were clearly pushing the boundaries of what could be done with 1Mhz microcomputers. Imagine what could have followed if they then had been upgraded to be slightly more capable. But incremental upgrades weren't really a thing at the time; everyone tended to create whole new platforms instead.
I think the real limitation was the amount of RAM that was clearly limiting it. The Amiga got plenty of RAM finally and could use samples much more efficiently. In addition to that, the AD and DA converters in the samplers also were costly and you had to pay a lot for real samplers well into the 90:s...
Such a fun episode! For what it's worth, I thought the whole thing was pretty cool. Any kind of sound digitizing on old 8-bits are just awesome because of the effort it took to make a consumer priced device to do what only the big game studios were doing of the time. So, as useless as you might view them, I truly enjoyed it.
I had the Voice Master for the Atari and yes they did put that adjustment tool in every box. Memory space for the audio file was a big issue, so you couldn't include too many sounds in any program that you created.
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH "BEST.FURDICH.FUN" > SATISFY.BABY < tricks I do not know Megan: "Hotter" Hopi: "Sweeter" Joonie: "Cooler" Yoongi: "Butter So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today. Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım '' Erinder: '' Sezimdüü '' Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak '' Dene: '' Muzdak '' Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis. Aç köz arstan Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon. Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan. Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾 They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising 💗❤💌💘
I had the "Voice Master Jr." It came with an integrated mike and a calibration wheel on the side, so the box stood vertically, and you just plugged it into the joystick port. It had most of the software features except the hum along and composer programs, so I guess they figured they weren't that great. Still, a fun thing to tinker with.
Voice recognition is kind of a tricky thing to do, especially with the 8-bit computers, since obviously, RAM capacity is limited as you already know, so it had to make do with simple spoken commands so it can actually do something without eating up all the RAM space. Nowadays we got decent flexibility due to both improved AI processing and obviously gigabytes of RAM (it's mind-blowing to see smartphones now sporting up to 16 - 20 GB of RAM compared to the 64 to 256 MB back in the early days of smartphones).
And now we also have computers in the cloud with their vast AI training sets, so your phone doesn't have to do much more than send the audio to the big G, or whomever, and some text comes back. I think I read somewhere that your voice is processed and then shared between 8 servers to do the actual recognition, presumably to keep up. So in theory, if we can get the data coming from the c64 cartridge and had a way to send to the cloud, we could get voice typing on the 8 bits too!
Dude!! I missed your videos buddy! Glad you're back! That's soon good nostalgic content right there! It's crazy how much technology has changed over the years. All these "expander packs" and cartridges to get a bit more out of your system. It seems like everything has went back to the way they used to be with massive components.. (especially video cards)
Great video! Thanks for making it! I still own a 1983 Apple IIe and Voice Master! I remember at age 15 or so trying to code a video game that was voice controlled, but I don't remember actually succeeding! It was a fun toy anyways!
Great review! Back in the days I would see these devices in the magazines, and imagine all the fun and productivity I would have using them. It appears my expectations were a bit higher than what they delivered.
Back in the day, we recorded samples on the Apple ][+ using the Muse Voice program and using input from the cassette ports. You could get recognizable playback of a few lines of a song spread over a few samples limited by the amount of memory in the machine.
I never knew there was software available for recording sound on the Apple ][ computers ... so I wrote my own. Using the cassette input too, I could record between 10 and 20 seconds of sound with the available memory. The time varied because I compressed the audio on the fly by counting the time intervals between the input changing from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. Voices and electric guitars sounded alright, but drums were impossible to replicate. Unfortunately, back in the day, all I had was a poor quality cassette player that added a lot of high-pitched noise. I remember recording the first couple of bars of the intro to Guns N' Roses "Sweet Child O' Mine" and then looped the second bar in playback, which confused some people.
In high school I chained a couple Apple //gs keyboards together. They both worked. Another kid and I typed at the same time and we got characters from both keyboards appearing on the screen all mixed together.
This was a great video, I had no idea audio capture was a thing back in the 80's, of course I only had a VIC20 and a Tandy Coco3! From my old radio days in the later 90's, I still remember the first digital computer audio recording and editing on a program for professional use called Session 8, and was amazed we finally could good quality sound on a computer for radio commercials. I still find it amazing when I hear the "Stay A While, Stay Forever!" it was the first time I ever heard speech on a computer beyond arcade games of the time.
The speech in Ghostbusters and Impossible Mission was provided by ESS (Electronic Speech Systems), which was originally started in the 1970s. They also provided speech for 221b Baker Street, Beach Head II, Cave of the Word Wizard, Desert Fox, Kennedy Approach and Solo Flight II. One quirk was that it required so much processor time that the CPU and SID chip had to be dedicated to the task, so there was no on-screen action while speech was being played (I bet you never noticed. Me either! At least the screen didn't have to be blanked. _That_ would've been noticeable.) They're still in business today under the name "ESS Technology"... their chips are used in LG smartphones, and high-end home audio players.
As soon as I seen the covox uses the joystick port, I had little hope for quality. Can't push much data through that. I think the Commodore sound sampler does an admirable job.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Kudos to your daughter for going along with her nerdy Dad's weird experiments, she sings far better than the computer hums along!
Wouldn't be surprised if she has choir experience, though I don't know how long she's been in school so I don't really have a way of judging
Shes definitely brave, thats not an easy song to sing.
She grow up with it and has been in 8bits videos several times over the years.
She can sing much better as many "professional" singers that are paid for singing. Paid a lot.
"but dad, I don't want to sing in front of the nerds!"
“Stay awhile, stay forever” was mind blowing when I first heard it. I couldn’t imagine how the computer made it.
Congrats on being the first pratt in the USA to reverse that recording!
Kind regards, Perifractic - the first pratt in the UK to do it back then
What system did you do it with?
@@The8BitGuy I had a cassette recorder that would play in reverse. I think it was Sony and the feature was called slow rewind if I recall! I also used it for Knight Rider episode Knightmares which had a creepy hologram saying what was supposedly an address backwards. When I reversed it, it was indeed very similar to the address!
You are FIRST 👏👏👏🍾🥂
Interestingly enough, the Czech dub of the series actually contained a sensible sentence there, not just a prank.
@@The8BitGuy I had a weekend job at a radio station at the time, so I just dubbed the audio off onto reel-to-reel down at the station, then flipped the tape over so it played backwards :)
"Another visitor. Stay awhile... Stay forever!". That introduction gave me chills every time.
As a kid, I kept making the character fall down the hole over and over just so I could hear the scream. For some reason I thought it was hilarious.
AaaaaaaaaAaaAAAaaaahhHHhhh
@@MegaFonebone it sounds a person going "a." but slowed down lmao
WHAT game is that from? I'm drawing a total blank & I used to play that game all the time.
@@turbochargedsports6327 impossible mission
16:49 Sounds so realistic! It's like I'm right there at the drive tru.
Half the time, it sounds the same to us on the "inside." The rest of the time it sounds like adults in Charlie Brown cartoons.
@@dashcamandy2242 So that's why there's usually only a very loose connection between what is ordered and what ends up in the bag.
You are so right! The sound coming out of that thing is making me hungry!
The music is reversable, but time is not. Turn back. Turn back. Turn back. Turn back!
@@tarstarkusz what is that a reference to?
Finding a new 8-Bit Guy video on RUclips is like finding a bucket of ice cubes in the desert. Always makes my day :)
I was obsessed with this stuff when I was a kid, of course I wanted the computer to speak and listen to me. I had saved and saved and got a voicemaster for c64, hearsay 1000 and later the PC version of the voicemaster. I had hours of fun... unfortunate it took about 30 years for them to talk back a little more intelligently. Great video!
how about now?
What about SAM?
30 more years and you will be able to hold a conversation with a computer without any delay or external input.
When Cortana and Siri came out the magic was already gone for me because I knew a bit how they worked but don't worry it does not stop me to talk to Siri when I'm bored.
Also back than when I found out I could get Cortana on Android I did talk to her when I was home alone.
The person who made the Voice Harp Recorder program (the humming one), Donald X. Vaccarino, is also the board game designer behind the massively popular game Dominion. It was neat to see his name in the credits at 13:23.
He also wrote the manual: "I originally wrote a funny manual for that program. And they laughed and laughed but said, well obviously this joke and this joke have got to go. So I edited them out and made whatever other changes and they proofread it again and said, oh hey we can't really have this joke or this joke. After four or fives passes of this I went through and removed all of the jokes. They were sad and the manual was done."
Wondered if anyone else spotted his name :) Some of my friends playtested the Dominion prototype. I got to try it before it was published.
@@JavaJack59 I immediately noticed it too and rewinded the video to make sure I saw it right. Really cool, especially because Kingdom Builder is currently my favourite board game.
Now that’s some crazy trivia
Funny thing is, you don't need any of this crap. I had a program from Compute or Ahoy that would allow you to record something on a cassette and then digitize it through the cassette port by just playing it in the datasette.
I wish we could read the version of the manual with all the jokes still in there!
I loved the voice harp. Sounds pretty much like when I sing along to something.
Oh wow! Super cool! I miss more music stuff like this! Great demo of these rare products! Also ur daughter has an awesome voice and it was cool seeing her for the first time!
Arthur Smith, (Red Dwarf Man) can actually speak backwards. He showed his talents on an episode of QI!
I just watched the Red Dwarf scene, holy shit thats hilarious
Haha, I came here to comment the same thing. I seem to remember a panel quiz show on BBC Radio 4 where he'd sing a song backwards, and the other contestants had to work out what the song was.
There was also an episode of the GI Joe cartoon from the Eighties where Destro said a line backwards - when i reversed it, it said something like: "Anybody who took the time to reverse this is a real dweeb." LOL. Thanks for the video 8-Bit Guy. :)
I bought this (voice Master, C64) for my hard earned money as a teenager in the mid 80's. It was very cool, I still have audio recordings of people from back then.
I still got it. Mine is an aluminium box instead of plastic.
My boyfriend is a huge fan of Red Dwarf, and he's gotten me into it as well. I did realise that the stuff being said in "Backwards" would probably be real sentences, but I've actually never tried reversing it myself. It was fun to hear that particular little clip :)
That is one of my favourite episodes of Red Dwarf!
The voice recognition was much better than I thought it would be for the 80s.
Kind of as expected for the time, but impressed it could run on that CPU speed.
Poor Cat realized one does not simply go to the bathroom in reverse :P
Just a few years ago I left a job at a warehouse where I used a headset voice-recognition picking system. Whatever I used wasn't much improved over what was used in the 80's!
Worst part of that system was when the voice recognition got confused and the machine would start screaming gibberish at 100 decibels. How nice of the developers to leave the debug system enabled in the field release and blast diagnostics right into my ear at full volume.
Watching 8-Bit Guy before sleeping, putting headphones in, arranging blanked and pillow nicely, and being eager to enjoy great content, all of a sudden I hear 3 knocks, I rip out my headphones, jump up from bed, my heartbeat went up a few notches and looking around to what caused this. While I was looking at the door, checking if anything fell down, running through every room to see what might have caused the sound, I realized it could also be the video... ( 0:58 ) So I just wanted to thank you for my late night cardio, my heart works :D 10/10 would recommend as personal trainer. :D (just wanted to share this funny story, no critique)
It's a family affair! The 8-Bit Guy, The Next Generation. Or, should we call her the 16-Bit Gal? She can specialize in neo-Retro from the late '90s.
I vote 16 bit gal :)
LGR eat your heart out lmao
can relate
Eventually the late 90s will be considered retro.
@@tricountyretail992 What do you mean, "eventually"? 😉😄
Had exactly the same experience of sampling and reversing the Red Dwarf clips on our Amiga. The hardware was a Sound Express (parallel port), and I think we blew the right channel trying to plug it into the phone line. Glory Days!
To this day, I remember being amazed by the voice synth my dad added to the Ti99/4a. It blew me away back then.
My favorite thing to do with the TI speech synth was to feed it strings of random phonemes with the CALL SAY command.
The TI's speech was a lot of fun. Pretty impressive audio from that one.
@@rick420buzz Didn't it include a hardware model of the human speech organs?
@@johndododoe1411 It kinda does, yeah. It uses technology called Linear Predictive Coding which basically models how speech is generated in the human vocal tract.
Absolutely awesome episode! I've always been fascinated by these ancient sound digitizers, never had the chance to mock around with 'em when i was a kid...Thank you for this retro thrill, dude! 👍
On my Acorn Atom (a 1979 British 6502-based computer, the direct forerunner of the BBC Micro), a short type-in program was published that let you digitise a few seconds of audio via the cassette port, so you could plug in a microphone instead of the tape deck and record your own voice. The audio was digitised into the 6K available just above screen memory. The quality was pretty awful, you could just make out your voice under a sea of noise, but it was still mind-blowing at the time.
Those British micro computers were amazing. I had a ZX81 myself.
Saw a version of that for the C64
I had the same kind of program (a short listing called dazzler in a magazine ) on m'y Amstrad CPC 6128, I just had to buy a standard din cable to make it works. The Amstrad 464 would do it with its integrated tape device direcly.
There was an Apple II program, MegaMusic, that did something like that. too. I was always amazed at the playback. Also the digitizer shown in this video is specifically for the //c. The port is not a "dumb" port - it has firmware for use with mice, so I wondered if that played a role.
18:38 "the time is 3 effing 4 pm"
I found this channel because of 8-Bit Keys and I miss seeing a new video pop up on a keyboard I hadn't heard of 😭🙏 Still love all the videos, and I'm glad to see any video of 8-Bit Guy's on my feed. Keep it up!
19:59 I had almost the same idea as a kid, but with an inverted color image that I saw in a magazine.
I scanned this and was happy when I applied the "inverse color" option and the original colors showed up.
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH
"BEST.FURDICH.FUN"
> SATISFY.BABY <
tricks I do not know
Megan: "Hotter"
Hopi: "Sweeter"
Joonie: "Cooler"
Yoongi: "Butter
So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today.
Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım ''
Erinder: '' Sezimdüü ''
Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak ''
Dene: '' Muzdak ''
Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis.
Aç köz arstan
Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon.
Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan.
Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾
They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising
💗❤💌💘
Ooh, I also had such moments of brilliant thinking when I was younger, always felt so satisfying :)
That moments as a kid were the best, when I had such ideas and it worked I always felt like I beat the system
If you want something that samples properly and has the look and feel of an 80's computer then a Roland S50/330/550/7XX is a must, the S50/550/330 is 12bit and the 7xx are 16bit. The 12bit line come with a monitor port (DIGITAL RGB (that can be easily converted to SCART and monochrome composite)as standard and can even be controlled with an MSX mouse.
There is a kind of having fun with the samplers and reversed sound that many people came up on their own: record a phrase, reverse it, listen to it, and try to mimick it with your voice as close as possible on another record, then reverse that. The result often sound pretty fun.
Ah yes, the _Twin Peaks_ effect.
When my family finally got a current computer with built-in sound capabilities in the early 2000s, I came up with a game with Windows Sound Recorder. A second person leaves the room, you record something and reverse it, and they come back in. Then you play them the reversed recording, and they record their best attempt at imitating the reversal. Then you reverse that and they try to guess what the original phrase was.
I thought I was the only one that did that!!
So....Twin Peaks? 😁
Love your demos and music, shiru.
Great video. I was also fascinated by the red dwarf episode back in the day. I recorded it onto cassette and played it in reverse to find out what was being said. Many thanks.
Absolutely fabulous; the amount of time that I used, dooling in SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) on C64 means, that I'd have been using even longer on mucking around with recordings. The Doctor Who and Red Dwarf findings is the cherry on top.
The best way I can describe the Voicemaster's "hum-along" mode is off-key digital farting. But maybe it's a lullaby for dial-up modems!
So basically Megadeth vocals.
I wasn't actually expecting a Red Dwarf reference today, but I am glad there was. Oh, one thing you might find amusing is that over here in the UK, on the DVD release of Backwards, one of the DVD extras was the entire episode of Backwards in reverse.
The American release also has the episode forwards. I'm a big RD fan since I found it on a public tv station in the 90's.
I was into UV etching my own PCB designs in those days & with a few friends that were also into electronics we built several different mono audio samplers for the C64 using different ADC ICs before settling on a design we were happy with. We ended up with two versions, one that cost about £10 that gave pretty decent results and one for about £35 that was built inside cheap Tandy/Radio Shack two channel audio mixer units. The manager of our local Radio Shack store eventually asked what we were doing with them when we bought all the two channel mixers they had in stock and asked when they would get more. It turned out the manager and a couple of the staff also had C64s and bought 3 samplers from us ! We gave them a 'discount' in the hope we might get the next batch we bought at a lower price, I ended up getting staff discount on a whole bunch of stuff from that store. Oh what Fun!
That Red Dwarf clip at the end got me! I've seen that episode 100 times and I never even considered reversing the audio! That was absolutely classic! Thank you so much for that! Lol!
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH
"BEST.FURDICH.FUN"
> SATISFY.BABY <
tricks I do not know
Megan: "Hotter"
Hopi: "Sweeter"
Joonie: "Cooler"
Yoongi: "Butter
So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today.
Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım ''
Erinder: '' Sezimdüü ''
Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak ''
Dene: '' Muzdak ''
Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis.
Aç köz arstan
Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon.
Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan.
Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾
They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising
💗❤💌💘
I remember reversing the audio on my Mum's 386SX with a SoundBlaster. I had recorded the episode the night before on an Amstrad dual deck VHS recorder, used a dictaphone to record from the TV speaker and plugged that into the audio-in on the sound card.
I can still quote that whole conversation to this day 😁
Will have to pull out the boxed set of Red Dwarf and watch that episode again, then play it in reverse with VLC.
I was born in 1989, so this stuff is all new to me. It's amazing how much we take these things for granted now because everything is integrated on the motherboard. This is why I love this channel though. Learning about all the old, obsolete tech, really makes me appreciate my computer more.
I wish I had played with sound more on my C64. Back in the day. The coolest thing I ever did with sound was to activate a keychain. I had a keychain that would say "I love you" when you whistled at the right pitch. I could never whistle so I wrote a C64 program to cycle thru all the sound frequencies until I found the range that would work. When I played the sound on the C64 the keychain would do its thing. My parents and friends were VERY impressed. Ah the good old days.
I was 1 of 5 winners of Micro Master Holland, a national computer programming contest, back in 1986. Won a trip to Disney World, with my Sound Sampler 64, same name but way better sampler program witten in assembler using all 64kb, it had 8 bit A/D on the cartridge port and 8 bit D/A on the printerport. Never new its existence until recently. I sold only 15 of them. I must have the source diskettes somewhere, must search again. Thank you for your demonstration.
Heck yea. Used to go dumpster diving back with a buddy in the 90s at a couple places that would throw away a lot of old electronics from the 80s at the time and came across a DECtalk Express. Although we discovered it after its time, it was still awesome to play with and made me appreciate the innovation of sound cards.
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH
"BEST.FURDICH.FUN"
> SATISFY.BABY <
tricks I do not know
Megan: "Hotter"
Hopi: "Sweeter"
Joonie: "Cooler"
Yoongi: "Butter
So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today.
Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım ''
Erinder: '' Sezimdüü ''
Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak ''
Dene: '' Muzdak ''
Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis.
Aç köz arstan
Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon.
Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan.
Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾
They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising
💗❤💌💘
Man that is just sad. As an actual blind person who utilized a DECtalk express in order to be able to use computers, I paid about $500 for one in The year 2000, and I was getting a good deal given what they were going for in the blind community at the time. Hearing that somebody was throwing them out in the 90s just makes me cringe. 😂
@@FriendlyNeighborhoodNitpicker that is sad indeed! I guess the people had no idea what it actually did! I found it on a pile of token ring network cards. Which I also rescued at the time haha. Ahhh. I’m amazed it cost that much!
The DECtalk devices were amazing for their time. I was supporting all kinds of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer and networking systems at the time, got to play with one briefly.
As I recall, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used them for the voice reporting on the special weather radio broadcasting on several special frequencies like 162.550 KHz. It hasn't been that many years ago that they switched to newer synthesized voices.
Thank you for sharing this. Older technology - sound and video cards in particular - get my attention and are an interesting topic to dig into. And the intro music to your channel is fantastic! Take care!
The Intellivision had an expansion module called the Intellivoice that gave digital playback of speech samples for certain games, such as "B-17 Bomber."
I remember playing that way back when I was a kid at the mall. "Beee seventeeen bawmmerrrrrr"
You da man! Thanks for the awesome vid! Knowledge drop from all this stuff that I was too young to be in to back in the day is much appreciated... One of my fave episodes of Red Dwarf BTW!
Your daughter sings very well. Loved this episode, the message from red dwarf was amazing
I reversed clips from that episode of Red Dwarf, it felt like the actor were talking to me & I was in wondrous amazement & I loved it!😊
I predicted you would mention the Red Dwarf episode when you were talking about the 70's episode of Doctor Who.
Daughter looks like she's saying "do I have to? Urgh fine"
5:00 I wasn't expecting this level of agression from 8-bit guy
11:20 "The question is: how well does it work?"
* The computer proceeds spamming random notes when David is silent *
Me: I'd say it works pretty well 👍
Haven't been able to watch a vid by you in a while, I'm excited for this one especially!!
Your daughter has a pretty great singing voice, although the computer does not seem to comprehend that
Covox also published a demo disk to show off their tech -- at least the parts that could work without actually having the hardware. It included things like a "talking calculator" and "Voice Master BASIC" for writing programs that dealt with samples. It works well in an emulator.
I never had the Covox hardware as a kid, but I did have fun with the demo disk, especially the BASIC example where it repeated the last syllable of "Voice Master" as an echo effect. I found it impressive, and the sound was burned into my brain enough that while watching your video 36 years later, whenever it said "Voice Master" I kept expecting to hear "Voice Masterterterterterter!" :)
I used the ZX Spectrum's mic socket for sampling in the mid 80's. It sounded decent, I would record chunks of songs into memory then save them to Microdrive. I could then load the chunks back in to play the full song. a 3 min track would be about 80K.
I was thinking about the Red Dwarf episode as you were talking about Dr Who. Being a big RD fan, and very much aware of Arthur Smith's message, I had a good chuckle to myself when you said that you actually reversed his little insult!! Nice one :o)
I can't remember which machine I had (Spectrum 128K or Atari STE maybe), but I remember reversing the Red Dwarf episode and also being impressed. I remembered it the moment you spoke about Dr Who!
After suffering through overly long, complicated youtube video openings, I have to compliment you on your perfectly made intro. It's got all the info you need to know what's going to be happening, and it's just the right length - 10 seconds. Thanks for not wasting my time.
It's being a while but I am glad to see the 8 Bit Guy back showing his technical knowledge again.
Love your daughters voice! I owned the technosound sampler for the Amiga and loved playing with that. There were several sampler software programs out there that could distort your voice like transposing up and down, dalek robot sound etc.
There is a system that came with a package called Softspeak which was on all of the PC Plus Superdiscs which said "Welcome to the PC Plus Superdisc" and also had the digitizer to allow you to create the sound files which could be turned into self playing files which played through the PC speaker.
I used to want one of these so bad! It's very interesting to see their capabilities in hindsight of current technologies. Thanks for the continuing trip down nostalgia lane!
The C64 datasette actually was a 1bit sound digitizer. A magazine back in the day had a small listing that allowed you to sample snippets from cassette tapes. There even was a diagram on where on the datasette's PCD to solder two leads so you could attach an external microphone. Lots of fun.
WOW!! :D
I had a magazine with a routine that lets you listen music from cassette tapes, although with bad quality sound.
The Apple ][e cassette input worked the same way. I typed in a program from Nibble magazine to record audio. I hooked up a microphone, recorded a bunch of phonemes, and made a crude text to speech synthesizer. If you ever played Castle Wolfenstein 2 on the Apple, it had some speech recorded in this way. 1 bit audio!
I think I had that! I also typed in a really, really long listing that allowed you to record and play back what was coming through. Basically all it did was record the change in volume coming through the tape head and then change the volume register up and down on playback.
@@cpm1003 I never saw that program in Nibble magazine, but I wrote my own program to record 1 bit audio using the cassette input. It sampled the input every 10 clock cycles. The built-in speaker could only be toggled on and off, so it too was essentially 1 bit audio. I think the voice recordings in Castle Wolfenstein were highly compressed so they did not sound so well. I got much better results with my own program. There was a speech synthesizer program for the Apple ][ computers called SAM, so I never thought of creating my own.
I don't know a thing about these gadgets, but your presentation is such a fun trip into the past.
I'm actually quite surprised by the speech recognition capabilities!
Nice job 8-Bit Daughter!
Thanks for this. I remember lusting after this thing (I'm pretty sure they advertised a VIC-20 model). I remember mentally computing how many days of delivering newspapers it would take to get it, and how cool it would be to talk to my computer.. but the VoiceMaster retailed for more than $100, too rich for my blood back then. Thank goodness I didn't; I would have been a bit heartbroken. But it's great to finally see what it was!
I remember when I got one for my amiga 500 back in the day to use with octamed. We were impressed back then with such things. How simple it seems now 😂
What sampler did you use? Was it Stereo Master by any chance?
@@BarryEuphorik yup
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH
"BEST.FURDICH.FUN"
> SATISFY.BABY <
tricks I do not know
Megan: "Hotter"
Hopi: "Sweeter"
Joonie: "Cooler"
Yoongi: "Butter
So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today.
Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım ''
Erinder: '' Sezimdüü ''
Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak ''
Dene: '' Muzdak ''
Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis.
Aç köz arstan
Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon.
Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan.
Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾
They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising
💗❤💌💘
I got my first audio digitizer on my Commodore Amiga too in the 80s and it was really good! Used it for fun and to record sounds for public performances, like a Patch the Pirate children's musical at our church. The Amiga did a great job of multitasking the playback of the sound samples, so I could have crickets playing back multiple times with each mouse click, over both the left and right channels of the auditorium's sound system which made it sound so real! The kids and the parents loved the effects it added!
PS. Love Red Dwarf! Was hilarious seeing the lady un-eat the hotdog and you being the first one in the states to hear what they were actually saying!
I was already thinking strongly of the Amiga when I went into the local computer shop. They had a disc copy program that someone had hacked to play the G&S Pirates of Penzance song whenever you started the copier - "Yo, ho, yo, ho, a pirate's life for me!" Played with very good fidelity through some OK speakers at the shop, it may have been the moment I decided to get that computer.
"Backwards" was one of my favorite Red Dwarf episodes, absolutely brilliant.
15:23 Hey, the return of the infamous paperclip. Glad to see it back 😁
Holy crap!
The Commodore Composer was programmed by Donald Vaccarino. The game designer of Dominion, the first ever deck building game. How weird is that?
Considering how often Siri banjaxxes what I ask her when I'm in the car that voice recognition isn't half bad: I would no doubt have been absolutely blown away by it in 1985. Great video, and loved the Red Dwarf clip - absolutely perfect!
The fact that they made the backwards audio an easter egg is absolutely brilliant
Love the videos. Big props to your daughter for putting her voice on the web! Great pipes!
10:50 Hoped for a "Cheating bitch" bit there. :)
I love that you started with Ghostbusters and Impossible Mission. We had both those games for our C64 as well as Kennedy Approach, which my father played a lot of. That was a air traffic control simulator where the game would use speech synthesis to repeat back your commands like a controller speaking to the aircraft.
I was so impressed with the voice clips in Impossible Mission and Ghostbusters back in the 80s. I had experimented with programming musical notes on the C64 and just assumed it was a very complicated form of that, somehow! 😂
Also Karate Kid was great, still have a copy of the C64 game. Amazing graphics and sound.
Just seeing that monitor up close brings back a flood of memories. Thousands of hours I spent in 8th grade changing the code for an Amiga 500 piece of bbs software (written in basic) to display ANSI graphics. Petra BBS.
So cool seeing a kalimba out of nowhere. What a great instrument, easy to learn, cheap and can be hold like a gamepad.
Tetris theme here i go again... :D
Only problem with it is having to grow out your thumbnails lol
@@ShaunDreclin There were some rubber fingercaps/tips provided... but i don't really use them and after a while your thumbs get used to it... or maybe i'm just not playing as loud ^^
This really brings back memories for me. I had a Commodore 64 and 128 as a kid. I got the Covox Voice Master and played around with it lot. I did a project recording me saying "Hi there" which is the very beginning of "Big Time" by Peter Gabriel. I recall being able to edit the waveform to try to emulate the faint ring in the Gabriel song.
this reminds me of an AVGN episode..
'mattel electronics presents BEEYSEVUNTEEYN BAWMURR!!!'
Don’t forget GERSHBUSHTERSH! 😆
David! What a great episode. I always enjoy and look forward to your content!
After hearing the Covox Voicemaster, it reminded me of the railroad defect detectors that broadcasted over the air to alert of any axle over temps or dragging equipment. This makes me wonder if the companies that built them used the same chips that were in the Convex. This may not be too much of a stretch since companies like to use more off-the-shelf components to build their products.
Oooh I've been waiting for this for a minute. Thanks for sharing sir!!
I love, Red Dwarf, especially the first 2 or 3 seasons. One of my favorites is when they go into a video game and make each other miserable.
"Wait. This isn't my fantasy."
"No, it's mine!"
Glad to see more stuff coming from you! Honestly, my favorite is the SFX Sound Sampler. It's got the best audio quality, and it doesn't have a bunch of useless gimmick demos.
These devices were clearly pushing the boundaries of what could be done with 1Mhz microcomputers. Imagine what could have followed if they then had been upgraded to be slightly more capable. But incremental upgrades weren't really a thing at the time; everyone tended to create whole new platforms instead.
I think the real limitation was the amount of RAM that was clearly limiting it. The Amiga got plenty of RAM finally and could use samples much more efficiently.
In addition to that, the AD and DA converters in the samplers also were costly and you had to pay a lot for real samplers well into the 90:s...
Such a fun episode! For what it's worth, I thought the whole thing was pretty cool. Any kind of sound digitizing on old 8-bits are just awesome because of the effort it took to make a consumer priced device to do what only the big game studios were doing of the time. So, as useless as you might view them, I truly enjoyed it.
Sinclair had audio input and could digitize sound. There was also software where You could put samples together and play digitized music.
4:56 "Hey listen to this, it's like an echo, just like social media"
Sounds about right to me lol
I had the Voice Master for the Atari and yes they did put that adjustment tool in every box. Memory space for the audio file was a big issue, so you couldn't include too many sounds in any program that you created.
⚡:SPEZIEL FÜR DICH
"BEST.FURDICH.FUN"
> SATISFY.BABY <
tricks I do not know
Megan: "Hotter"
Hopi: "Sweeter"
Joonie: "Cooler"
Yoongi: "Butter
So with toy and his tricks, do not read it to him that he writes well mamon there are only to laugh for a while and not be sad and stressed because of the hard life that is lived today.
Köz karaş: '' Taŋ kaldım ''
Erinder: '' Sezimdüü ''
Jılmayuu: '' Tattuuraak ''
Dene: '' Muzdak ''
Jizn, kak krasivaya melodiya, tolko pesni pereputalis.
Aç köz arstan
Bul ukmuştuuday ısık kün bolçu, jana arstan abdan açka bolgon.
Uyunan çıgıp, tigi jer-jerdi izdedi. Al kiçinekey koyondu wins taba algan. Al bir az oylonboy koyondu karmadı. '' Bul koyon menin kursagımdı toyguza albayt '' dep oylodu arstan.
Arstan koyondu öltüröyün dep jatkanda, bir kiyik tigi tarapka çurkadı. Arstan aç köz bolup kaldı. Kiçine koyondu emes, çoŋ kiyikti jegen jakşı dep oylodu. # 垃圾
They are one of the best concerts, you can not go but just seeing them from the screen, I know it was surprising
💗❤💌💘
@@lomaii2847 Oh god, not the spam sex bots.
@@andymerrett Bots that endlessly post sex ads.
I had Stereo Master for the STE.
What's the ADC width and sample rate? I seem to recall later Sun machines going with the same 8 bit 8 ksps format used for digital phone lines.
Thank you for yet another great, in-depth video!! I'd love to know more about the Commodore FM Sound Module and Magic Voice Cartridge someday!!!
I had the "Voice Master Jr." It came with an integrated mike and a calibration wheel on the side, so the box stood vertically, and you just plugged it into the joystick port. It had most of the software features except the hum along and composer programs, so I guess they figured they weren't that great. Still, a fun thing to tinker with.
This moment at 9:58 when your C64 can understand you better, than my PS4 with fancy headset can understand me. 😬
Voice recognition is kind of a tricky thing to do, especially with the 8-bit computers, since obviously, RAM capacity is limited as you already know, so it had to make do with simple spoken commands so it can actually do something without eating up all the RAM space. Nowadays we got decent flexibility due to both improved AI processing and obviously gigabytes of RAM (it's mind-blowing to see smartphones now sporting up to 16 - 20 GB of RAM compared to the 64 to 256 MB back in the early days of smartphones).
And now we also have computers in the cloud with their vast AI training sets, so your phone doesn't have to do much more than send the audio to the big G, or whomever, and some text comes back. I think I read somewhere that your voice is processed and then shared between 8 servers to do the actual recognition, presumably to keep up. So in theory, if we can get the data coming from the c64 cartridge and had a way to send to the cloud, we could get voice typing on the 8 bits too!
Dude!! I missed your videos buddy! Glad you're back! That's soon good nostalgic content right there! It's crazy how much technology has changed over the years. All these "expander packs" and cartridges to get a bit more out of your system. It seems like everything has went back to the way they used to be with massive components.. (especially video cards)
17:24 You should probably try with a sinewave instead, should probably be easier for it to figure out the right octave (for obvious reasons...)
Great video! Thanks for making it! I still own a 1983 Apple IIe and Voice Master! I remember at age 15 or so trying to code a video game that was voice controlled, but I don't remember actually succeeding! It was a fun toy anyways!
I remember having the voicemaster, it was fun for a while.
Great review! Back in the days I would see these devices in the magazines, and imagine all the fun and productivity I would have using them. It appears my expectations were a bit higher than what they delivered.
Aren't the analog cassette input's (on an Apple II, for example) technically audio inputs tho?
I enjoy watching your videos. Takes me back to my jrhs days. BTW happy new year.
4:18 its not Christmas anymore!! Lol
It is now
Back in the day, we recorded samples on the Apple ][+ using the Muse Voice program and using input from the cassette ports. You could get recognizable playback of a few lines of a song spread over a few samples limited by the amount of memory in the machine.
I never knew there was software available for recording sound on the Apple ][ computers ... so I wrote my own. Using the cassette input too, I could record between 10 and 20 seconds of sound with the available memory. The time varied because I compressed the audio on the fly by counting the time intervals between the input changing from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. Voices and electric guitars sounded alright, but drums were impossible to replicate. Unfortunately, back in the day, all I had was a poor quality cassette player that added a lot of high-pitched noise. I remember recording the first couple of bars of the intro to Guns N' Roses "Sweet Child O' Mine" and then looped the second bar in playback, which confused some people.
Can you chain those three sound cartridges together?
Yes! That would be a great experiment.
In high school I chained a couple Apple //gs keyboards together. They both worked. Another kid and I typed at the same time and we got characters from both keyboards appearing on the screen all mixed together.
This was a great video, I had no idea audio capture was a thing back in the 80's, of course I only had a VIC20 and a Tandy Coco3! From my old radio days in the later 90's, I still remember the first digital computer audio recording and editing on a program for professional use called Session 8, and was amazed we finally could good quality sound on a computer for radio commercials. I still find it amazing when I hear the "Stay A While, Stay Forever!" it was the first time I ever heard speech on a computer beyond arcade games of the time.
Sound cards became available in the early 1990s for PCs that could play CD quality sound.
The speech in Ghostbusters and Impossible Mission was provided by ESS (Electronic Speech Systems), which was originally started in the 1970s. They also provided speech for 221b Baker Street, Beach Head II, Cave of the Word Wizard, Desert Fox, Kennedy Approach and Solo Flight II. One quirk was that it required so much processor time that the CPU and SID chip had to be dedicated to the task, so there was no on-screen action while speech was being played (I bet you never noticed. Me either! At least the screen didn't have to be blanked. _That_ would've been noticeable.) They're still in business today under the name "ESS Technology"... their chips are used in LG smartphones, and high-end home audio players.
I had build my own sampler for my C64 from a magazine called "64'er" edition 10/86 . It was cheap and works very fine. I had so much fun 😀
As soon as I seen the covox uses the joystick port, I had little hope for quality. Can't push much data through that. I think the Commodore sound sampler does an admirable job.