Welp, here's my first "big" project! I knew immediately after bikibird released Speako-8 that I would have to make something with it, and so I decided to make it a tribute to a certain departed musical legend and fellow speech synthesis nerd. (Also THANKS SO MUCH to bikibird for helping out with playtesting and debugging a LOT of it)
That said, I'm not sure how well it will run online or on other people's machines, so if anything's buggy or could be improved, feel free to let me know!
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this is the first thing i've made with p8 that can be called a "game". it's awful
UPDATE: now with motion borders and an actual difficulty curve! doug's AI is still a 50/50 drunk-walk though but idk maybe thats kinda hilarious? or my sense of humor is entirely broken, which is also a possibility.
More experiments from reading over H2Obsession's deconstruction of SAM. I also attempted to implement more phonemes than this, but not all of them sounded right.
So since I can't get the idea of a Software Automatic Mouth port for Pico-8 out of my head, I experimented with trying to generate similar sounds in bytebeat, and I ended up with something that aaalmostkindasorta makes vowels?
Most research courtesy of H2Obsession: https://sites.google.com/site/h2obsession/CBM/C128/SAM-128/technical
PICO-8 PCM COLAB: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1HyiciemxfCDS9DxE98UCtNXas5TrM-5e?usp=sharing
So after reading carlc27843 and czarlo's explanations of how to digitize audio for Pico-8, I wanted to see if I could make things a little bit easier on myself by making a Colab to automate the process. Hope this is useful to someone!
Hey, I'm not sure if this is the right category to post this in, but as an Audio Guy I'm intrigued by the possibility of direct control of Pico-8's DAC? (Then again, I'm not entirely certain whether Pico-8 HAS a DAC, or just a sample playback routine that goes directly to the host machine's DAC.) Either way, I have found the possibility of "user waveform" slots (a la the Namco Custom30) in Pico-8 to be pretty intriguing. Many old microcomputer systems have had some form of exploit or another to directly control the DAC (this is famously how sampled sound and digitized speech could be played back on the C64). Theoretically, would this be possible in Pico-8, or will its architecture not allow it?
I'm curious if there are plans for a "devkit keyboard" ability for p8? It would make it feel more like a microcomputer than a console, but I think some very interesting stuff could be made that involves text input.
