Is it possible to call the superior speech from basic with a variable ?

Once the disk image is inserted, this prog will work

10 *RUN "SPEECH"
20 *SAY "HELLO"

But this one doesn't

10 *RUN "SPEECH"
20 A$ = "HELLO"
30 *SAY A$


Superior software speech
http://www.strafom.force9.co.uk/bbc/Ret ... peechr.zip

You need to write:

10 *RUN SPEECH
20 A$="HELLO"
30 OSCLI "*SAY "+A$

Cheers - my final version of this 4 liner:

10 *RUN SPEECH
20 INPUT "SAY: " A$
30 OSCLI "*SAY"+A$
40 GOTO 20

Wrapping Beebem into a vst, feeding the text in and getting the audio back out is probably a little too much effort for now

In Line 30 you can leave out the * and make sure you have a space after SAY inside the quotes

i.e. OSCLI "SAY "+A$

Heh, actually you can't - because Speech's custom OSCLI handler compares against the whole string including the '*' (which it shouldn't - naughty Speech!)

You're quite right - now you mention it I remember that little quirk

I noticed running the emu at different speeds can change the pitch - I wonder if superior speech uses a timer interrupt for this, is there a likely thing I could try changing - and some code to change the timing, to see it will change the pitch?

There's actually a command I think: *PITCH - follow it with a letter from A-Z to change the pitch.

Oh nice, I suppose the *PITCH A is running the fastest it could possibly go?

I'm still interested to see if it could be persuaded to go higher as it's quite a low pitch

There was also the *SPEAK command which was more versatile than *SAY, although trickier to use. You may be able to use that to get it going at a higher pitch.

From memory (it's been over a decade since I've used Speech!) I used to be able to make it sound like a mouse on helium without resorting to using *SPEAK.

Kind regards,

Francis.