Yape 0.68 released

[Robert]

Commodore Plus 4 emulator

 

Yape 0.68 with "THE" magical voice is here!

 

What seems like a minor update is actually a huge achievement, and again my emulator has become a first-timer with the Toshiba 6721 speech LSI emulation. As you may - or may not - know, this chip was featured in the V364 prototype as well as in the actual production "Magic Voice" cartridge unit for the Commodore 64. Yape has been having V364 support for a while, but the speech had relied upon Windows' built-in Text-to-Speech API and as such was not to be called real emulation, rather "simulation". The almost total lack of documentation regarding the T6721 LSI rendered the truthful resurrection of this prototype almost hopeless. Yet, years after my first call in 2000 for researching the V364, it is now reality! Not all aspects are clear, of course, but enough to get the built-in speech working and with excellent quality. Check out Bo Zimmerman's V364 page - it has all the original WAV recordings - and hear for yourself! I'll put up a page soon about programming the Toshiba 6721 and a few hints on how to create custom speech with it. I have loads of ideas:

 

making a Magic Voice modul for C64 emulators

designing & building a "Magic Voice" cartridge for the plus/4 that is compatible with the V364 prototype ROM program (volunteers?)

 

porting the cartridge version of Wizard of Wor - that featured speech - from the C64 to the plus/4

 

creating custom speech from WAV files

 

using the T6721 chip for music (after all, it has pitch control, a 10 stage filter, white noise & triangle wave source and 15 bit digital output). At the very least it should be possible to do digi playback with it!

 

Anyway, enough of the hype, here is a list of all the changes in this release:

 

* true Toshiba 6721 speech LSI emulation (custom vocabularies works, too!)

* performance mode for very slow PCs

* separate drive reset

* bugfixes

 

Let's not forget about another very cool feature: the performance mode. In this mode (to be found in the Machine settings dialog window) Yape will sacrifice some TED accuracy for sake of more speed, in general you can achieve 2-3 times higher speeds depending on the actual situation. However, you are unable to use true drive emulation in this mode.

 

Get this new copy from this page. Also check out Clickgamer's plus/4 page here where version 1.1 of my plus/4 emulator for the Pocket PC has recently been made available.