S.A.M.
The first, commercially available, all-software text-to-speech synthesizer for microcomputers was written by the people at SoftVoice in 1979. S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) was a best-seller on Apple, Atari, and Commodore computers. For the Commodore C64 it was published in the year 1982 by Don't Ask Software.
Sometime in the middle of 2004 Groepaz started to play around with SAM in IDA for curiousity, and over time extracted the code of the speech engine, cleaned it up and reordered the code and data a bit. By the end of 2006 he got in touch with Sebastian, who was also curious about the inner workings of SAM. They shared their work, and Sebastian continued to reverse-engineer and finally reimplemented the whole engine in portable C.
| Date |
Name |
Who did it? |
What is it? |
| 18.02.2007 |
SDL SAM |
Sebastian |
Portable reimplementation using SDL (source) |
| 18.02.2007 |
SDL SAM Readme |
Sebastian |
instructions and explainations to the above. includes some documentation of the inner workings of SAM, which also apply to the C64 version (and any other probably) |
| 30.07.2007 |
C64 SAM |
Groepaz |
disassembly of the original C64-SAM (source) |
Sebastians Website
original (Atari) SAM Manual
SAM on Wikipedia
SAM-Player - a minimal Commodore 64 emulator which runs the Sam Synthesizer program
