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Can't hear speech in "Ruairi Says Rectum"

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:13 am
by equinox
I'm trying to emulate a little joke demo called Ruairi Says Rectum.
Here (on YouTube) is how it should sound. Note the speech that plays during gaps in the music.
But I don't hear any speech in either Spectaculator or FUSE: it's just silent.
Any ideas?

Re: Can't hear speech in "Ruairi Says Rectum"

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 9:16 am
by Alessandro
Hi, UnrealSpeccy seems the only emulator able to reproduce the speech in the demo. I tested it with version 0.39.0, Pentagon 128K emulated.

Re: Can't hear speech in "Ruairi Says Rectum"

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 9:45 am
by Ast A. Moore
The demo toggles Bit 3 of Port 254, instead of Bit 4. While on a real Spectrum both will generate sound (toggling Bit 3 normally produces a lower volume signal), strictly speaking, Bit 4 is the one that should be used for generating sound effects.

On a real Spectrum, both are physically wired to a speaker (on a 48K machine only) and to the MIC/EAR ports via resistors, so toggling one bit will affect the state on the other. Most emulators, however, treat them differently so toggling Bit 3 generates no sound at all.

In this particular instance, all the instances of AND 8 in the ULA sound generation routine should be replaced with AND 16.

Re: Can't hear speech in "Ruairi Says Rectum"

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 4:00 pm
by equinox
Aha, I see. Sounds like one of those increasingly rare features that emulator authors still need to implement.

I installed UnrealSpeccy and got it working (after a little messing about tweaking settings) but that emulator doesn't seem to work too well for me. The first couple of seconds of the music (immediately after tape loading) get cut off for some reason; also it seems hit-and-miss whether it plays at all: often, even in 128 mode, the entire thing is silent: no music nor speech.

I had hoped to record the output. If anyone happens to be easily able to produce a lossless recording of the whole track, that would be great. Thanks.

Re: Can't hear speech in "Ruairi Says Rectum"

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 4:36 pm
by Alessandro
equinox wrote: Thu Apr 18, 2019 4:00 pm Aha, I see. Sounds like one of those increasingly rare features that emulator authors still need to implement.

I installed UnrealSpeccy and got it working (after a little messing about tweaking settings) but that emulator doesn't seem to work too well for me. The first couple of seconds of the music (immediately after tape loading) get cut off for some reason; also it seems hit-and-miss whether it plays at all: often, even in 128 mode, the entire thing is silent: no music nor speech.
Very strange. I decompressed the emulator in a folder, clicked on UNREAL.EXE, pressed F3 to load the file with the demo, no issues at all. There was no need to fiddle with the settings.

In addition to that, I was able to record the sound output to a WAV file.

Re: Can't hear speech in "Ruairi Says Rectum"

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:03 pm
by ZXDunny
There was a Spanish game that used speech on the mic port, ZXSpin emulates it pretty well but it's been a while since we did that :)

Re: Can't hear speech in "Ruairi Says Rectum"

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:45 pm
by zx81
ZXDunny wrote: Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:03 pm There was a Spanish game that used speech on the mic port, ZXSpin emulates it pretty well but it's been a while since we did that :)
Was Cobra's Arc. Another game with MIC tune is Sizewize.

Re: Can't hear speech in "Ruairi Says Rectum"

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 7:51 pm
by equinox
Thanks, Alessandro: that WAV file was what I needed.

I don't know why UnrealSpeccy was glitchy for me, but possibly because my computer is slightly old (about a decade -- though still very capable of emulating a Spectrum, one would imagine) or because having a separate app recording the speaker output interferes with things.