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Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: Howard_Casto on March 24, 2010, 12:54:04 am

Title: You can easily make your own Sapi voices? (Who knew?)
Post by: Howard_Casto on March 24, 2010, 12:54:04 am

So I was supposed to button up the mame source changes and submit them tonight but I got a crazy idea about making sapi voices (text to speech) from the samples of various arcade games. 

Gorf immediately came to mind because all the synthesized text is in sample form and the gorf machine says a LOT of different phrases.  I had origionally intended to take the samples and cut them up until I had the entire english phonetic alphabet and make a custom app, but while researching the phonetic alphabet I ran across this article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms720183(VS.85).aspx (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms720183(VS.85).aspx)


For those too lazy to read, apparently there is a little app in the sdk called mkvoice.  Mkvoice takes a simple text file with a list of words, and a bunch of wav files that say said words and magically turns it into a fully-functional sapi font! 

Now I haven't tried this yet because mkvoice is in source code only and I'll have to download vs7 to complie it.  But seriously how cool is that? 

So anyway, we need a list of games that have significant synthesized speech samples. 

Gorf and Berzerk come to mind.... any others?


Also keep in mind that this goes beyond mame as well.  The default library for mkvoice only has about 10-20 words, so one could take a sound board off the net and convert that into a sapi voice as well.


Any interest?

Title: Re: You can easily make your own Sapi voices? (Who knew?)
Post by: SlayerAlex on March 24, 2010, 05:25:27 am

Gauntlet of course. sounds cool

Title: Re: You can easily make your own Sapi voices? (Who knew?)
Post by: Thenasty on March 26, 2010, 09:24:59 am

Astro Blaster
Wizard of Wor
Crazy Climber
Altered Beast

Title: Re: You can easily make your own Sapi voices? (Who knew?)
Post by: Ginsu Victim on March 26, 2010, 09:53:50 am

I use this site to make samples for my frontend
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php (http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php)

Title: Re: You can easily make your own Sapi voices? (Who knew?)
Post by: Howard_Casto on March 26, 2010, 06:06:47 pm

Bah!... I can't get mkvoice to work properly.  It makes the vce file, but the vce file won't register.