Bondwell 12/14, reverse engineering and improvements of SPEECH.COM
Here is progresses performing reverse engineering of Bondwell 12/14 SPEECH.COM program. After disassembling it I have added some new features, like speech directly from command line, singing and speech speed.
Now you can write something like:
SAY Hello World!
Text is normally interpreted as English. Text inside [...] is interpreted as Phonemes.
'|p' sets the pitch (0..255), 0=high, 255=low, default is 64. For example "say |p27 hello". A space must follow pitch setting.
Multiple pitches can be specified. ie: "say |p20 hello |p50 world |p90 fab"
'|s' sets the speed (0..225), 0=fast, 225=slow, default is 72. For example "say |s30 slow speak". A space must follow speed setting.
Multiple speeds can be specified and mixed with picthes.
'|m1' enable song mode.
'|m0' disable song mode.
If the specified text represents a file it is loaded and spoken. File may contain parameters like '|s', etc... Example:
say mytext.txt
You can find original SPEECH.COM inside first system disk (CP/M) of Bondwell 12/14 and 16.
Phonemes and almost all tables are the same of SAM (Software Automatic Mouth), a very popylar Text-To-Speech program running on Apple II and Commodore 64. Large parts of code are directly converted to Z80 code from 6502 code. I don't know if Bondwell was ever authorized by the author of SAM to do this.
