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Guide to using the National Semiconductor Digitalker Vocabulary Selection Software (DVSS)

Background

I've recently built an Arduino shield for my Digitialker chip which has been stored in its box for 25+ years! My incentive to create the shield was given a boost by the discovery of quite a few ROM dumps of various pre-configured ROM vocabularies uploaded to the Internet Archive.

This was give a further boost by the recent appearance of a National Semiconductor software product called the Digitalker Vocabulary Selection Software (DTSW-500) on the bitsavers website.

From the first paragraph of the DVSS datasheet:

The DIGITALKER Vocabulary Development System (DVSS) is a CP/M software package which provides 500 highly intelligible English words in a male speaking voice. These words are intended for users of National Semiconductor's DIGITALKER MM54104 Speech Processor Chip. The package provides a complete software environment that allows users to create speech PROMs containinag a vocabulary of words, phrases, or sentences put together from the 500 words supplied.

I already have a small CP/M system based around a few boards from Small Computer Central so I thought I'd try and see if I could get the DVSS software to work. The user manual for the software isn't included on the disks so presumably was a hard copy distributed with the original software.

After a bit of experimentation, I figured it all out and decided to write it up here for the benefit of others.

The good news is that no actual hardware CP/M system is required in order to use the DVSS programs.

What follows is based on the notes I made at the time - enjoy!

Access to a CP/M system

I started my DVSS experimenting on my RC2014 CP/M system but then decided to look for a CP/M emulation that would allow experimenting without the need for any CP/M hardware.

After a short search, I came across RunCPM. You can read my walkthrough guide on how I set the CP/M emulator on a Windows 10 PC.

A basic tour of the DVSS programs and files

This section can be skipped as it's just a basic tour of the files and what I think they are/do.

Once I had my CP/M emulator setup with the DVSS software, I had a browse around the files and documented what I found and my thoughts as I explored.

The VERIFY.VOC file

The VERIFY.VOC (VOC = vocabulary) file is used to specify the words, phrases and sounds that the user wants to include in the final ROMs.

I've documented what I've discovered about this file as it is the key to creating a custom ROM set.

A walkthrough creating a custom speech ROM

After playing with the DVSS programs I've figured out how to create custom speech ROMs for the Digitalker chip. I've created a sample walkthough that hopefully should allow others to create custom ROMs too. Note that the custom ROMs are limited to using the words and sounds supplied with the original DVSS package.

A set of ROMs with all the words in the the DVSS library

I've created a set of 5x 16Kbyte ROMs that hold all the words and sounds that are supplied with DVSS. Look for them in the ROMs folder.

Have fun!

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User guide for the Digitalker DTSS Software

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