Covox Speech Thing

Various other hardware solutions.
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alexh
Posts: 698
Joined: Tue Oct 17, 2017 4:51 pm
Location: Oxfordshire

Covox Speech Thing

Post by alexh »

As perhaps the biggest fan of Thalion games, in particular ones with music by Jochen "MadMax" Hippel I've been wanting to try the games he wrote which had support for the Covox Speech Thing.

For those of you who don't know this is an external LPT DAC which as the name sounds connects to the parallel port and the programmer streams the digital audio data to the parallel port instead of faking sample playback with the YM.

And if you were inclined to do so you can still buy them (or rather clones of them) today HERE or they are really easy to make as they are just an R2R ladder DAC.

While I never saw one in the wild in the old days, they must have been popular as several of applications and demos have support for the LPT DAC. (AudioSculpture, NoiseTracker, TCBTracker, ULM demos, B.A.C. demos etc. etc.)

The author of SCUMMVM Lite (being developed today) has said he was considering Covox Speech Thing support

Now two of my favourite games "Wings of Death" and the sequel (not officially a Thalion game) "Lethal Xcess" both support an LPT DAC (Ext Digital) in the main menu.

I was going create videos showing the sound differences between STF(M) PSG and the LPT DAC when I discovered (only a few months ago) another Atari Scener TPAU of B.A.C. has already done it (May 2020)!!

It's just a nice bit of FUN, something different if you've not come across it.

Wings of Death


Lethal Xcess


B.A.C. demo
Principal ASIC Engineer - SystemVerilog, VHDL
Thalion Webshrine - http://thalion.atari.org
STf,STfm,STe,MegaST,MegaSTe,Falcon060
A500+,A600,A4000/060,CD32,CDTV
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sandord
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Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 10:08 pm
Location: The Netherlands
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Re: Covox Speech Thing

Post by sandord »

Yeah, I remember that setting in Wings of Death. Too bad I didn't have the opportunity to try it out back then.

How were you actually supposed to use this thing in relation to the PSG chip tunes? I mean, you do want to hear both the PSG and the Covox mixed together, right?
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