Spectrum Computing

I was just wondering if there was some list or database with all the games featuring samples/speech? Or even an archive of ripped samples?

I was curious roughly how many games there are with samples?

A library might not be much use as there'll be as many different ways of encoding and replaying the sample as there are games that do it!
Although it might be an idea for an extra tag in the database.

Ones I know of are Ghostbusters and Grand Prix Simulator 1 & 2. The latter is probably the clearest example on a 48K. Ghostbusters is almost unintelligible on 48K; the 128K / AY sample is a lot clearer.

Here's a video with loads I didn't know about. The 128K Rasputin (2:58) and Robocop (3:05) ones are particularly good.



I dread to think how much extra time was spent waiting for games to load just to hear a few seconds of speech!

I don't suppose anyone ever bothered sampling anything other than speech though. On 16-bit machines with faster CPUs, timed interrupts or sample-capable chips you'd get sampled music loops and spot effects, and maybe some Speccy 128K demos can do that, but in games? Unlikely.

Robin of the Wood and I ball - both with great speech from beeper

On the more hard to hear, is E.T.X (Abbex) and Voice Chess

The Oliver Twins tended to stick speech whenever they could, Treasure Island Dizzy and Fantasy World Dizzy definitely had some (of varying quality)

and while reading this, this popped up on Youtube - forward to 1.30

AndyC wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 7:09 pm The Oliver Twins tended to stick speech whenever they could, Treasure Island Dizzy and Fantasy World Dizzy definitely had some (of varying quality)

A few of the Codemasters games have "digitised voice synthesis" as one of the selling points splashed on the inlay / cover. A lot of the Codemasters titles had speech shoehorned in. Seems like they decided to fill any unused memory available for this gimmick. To be fair it used to impress me as a kid.

I think Grand Prix Simulator 2 is a great example and it's quite efficiently planned, too. It can only say "One", "Two", "Three", "Player", "Position" and "Go", but it's able to string those together to countdown to the start ("Three Two One Go!"), and announce the results of the race ("Player two, position one" etc.).

Joefish wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 7:40 pm I think Grand Prix Simulator 2 is a great example and it's quite efficiently planned, too. It can only say "One", "Two", "Three", "Player", "Position" and "Go", but it's able to string those together to countdown to the start ("Three Two One Go!"), and announce the results of the race ("Player two, position one" etc.).

And there's an awesome story behind it, as well. I asked the Oliver Twins at Spectrum40.

The clearest speech I ever heard on the Speccy was on SWIV, which sampled Aliens “Get away from her you bitch!” when you activated the cheat mode.

Robocop on the 128k had speech, as did Chase H.Q which also had a sample credit sound effect.

I was going to add Chase HQ. I think it was the first time I’d heard such sounds on the Speccy.

I wonder how much memory the samples took?

worcestersource wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 9:43 pm I was going to add Chase HQ. I think it was the first time I’d heard such sounds on the Speccy.
I wonder how much memory the samples took?

Given that the game ran in 48K, my guess would be around 80K!

Well, maybe not the full remaining memory, but it would have been a horrendous addition to the loading time.

This game Star Trek 5 has full speech with a sort of synthesized voice. If you break the program you can alter the value of variable x$ and listen to it by giving GO SUB 2. Capital letters are doubles.

According to the magazine, the speech routine is 9525 bytes long.

Since we're listing games, are few which haven't been mentioned are:

• KLAX
• The Ark of Yesod
• Advanced Pinball Simulator
• Kwik Snax

Joefish wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 6:31 pm I don't suppose anyone ever bothered sampling anything other than speech though.

Glider Rider's "Game Over" music is (presumably) a sample. Also, Mortal Kombat uses a few short samples for sound effects and it works incredibly well. Surprising that more games haven't done this!

Quicksilver's Meteor Storm has some kind of garbled speech which is some achievement in a 16k game, and The Chess Player by them says "This is The Chess Player" on loading, plus one or two other phrases during the game ; for example it would say "Nice move" occasionally

TWINZ has short sampled beeper music (technically, it is crude sequencer playing various samples at variable speed), check time 0:10-0:20 in this video

-The Last Corridor
-Afteroids
-Yucan
-The Running Man
-Rocman
-Comeme el Chip

TOI Acid Game: both sampled voice and music at the beginning
Some commonly-seen beeper engines of late use samples for drums (e.g.Phaser) and sometimes other stuff too, so technically any game with that

Counter-example: Shadow Skimmer has what sounds like a typical WHAM beeper tune but with some cool and different-sounding sampled (?) parts. Now that I look at it though, it seems to use the same sound loop for both, but different 'setup routines'. So it's more like they have a routine for playing back a WHAM like song, and some others for playing various effects with the same sound loop.

Turtle_Quality wrote: ↑Thu Apr 13, 2023 7:02 am Quicksilver's Meteor Storm has some kind of garbled speech which is some achievement in a 16k game, and The Chess Player by them says "This is The Chess Player" on loading, plus one or two other phrases during the game ; for example it would say "Nice move" occasionally

Hah! That brings back memories. A game that loads with LOAD “” CODE and us kids going round the house spouting “Meteor storm, meteor storm” in a slightly garbled fashion. My parents must’ve wondered what we were on about!

Now that I think of it: Punchy. It's a game a lot of us had, at least those of us who came to the Spectrum a bit late, once Lord Yes Sir Alan "You're Fired!" Sugar had his cockney mitts all over it.

What none of us knew at the time was that it was a hasty retool of Hunchy, Mr. Micro's original unofficial Super Hunchback clone. And, looking at the two games side by side, it's clearly the same voice in both. "QUASIMODO! QUASIMODO! OH, ESMERELDA! THE BELLS! THE BELLS! ...what's that? Lawyers... right... change the H to a P, right, now it's Punch and Judy instead... let's get some sound samples... THAT'S THE WAY TO DO IT! HARRR HARRR HARRR HARRR! ROCK THE BABY! ...right, are they still on us? No? We're in the clear, and... cut!"

With these early games - seeing as Meteor Storm and The Chess Player have been mentioned - are they likely to be actually recorded voice samples, or synthesised with an external program? If the latter, what's it likely to be?

Swainy wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 9:24 pm The clearest speech I ever heard on the Speccy was on SWIV, which sampled Aliens “Get away from her you bitch!” when you activated the cheat mode.

I concur.

International Karate has nice speech: "Full point red", "half point red", "begin", etc.

worcestersource wrote: ↑Thu Apr 13, 2023 9:16 am Hah! That brings back memories. A game that loads with LOAD “” CODE and us kids going round the house spouting “Meteor storm, meteor storm” in a slightly garbled fashion. My parents must’ve wondered what we were on about!

Though from my memory it sounds like "METEOR ALERT!!! METEOR ALERT!!!".

Another one is Chimera, which from what I remember has a couple of samples.

- One saying "Chimera" on the menu screen. I think the voice pitch/speed is changed for this each time.

- The other one when you die which says something like: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhh...!!!"

The latter almost made me jump out of my chair when I first heard it.

Lee Bee wrote: ↑Wed Apr 12, 2023 3:02 pm Or even an archive of ripped samples?

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/music.php

So, collating all the info provided so far, here's the current list… (54 games)

Spectrum games with sound samples
180!
1999
3D Starfighter
Advanced Pinball Simulator
Afteroids
Chase HQ
Chimera
Comeme el Chip
Death Star Interceptor
Dyna Mo
E.T.X
European 5-a-Side
Fantasy World Dizzy
Fast Food
Ghost Hunters
Ghostbusters
Glider Rider
Grand Prix Simulator 1 & 2
Hunchy
I Ball 1 & 2
International Karate
Jail Break
Jonah Barrington's Squash
KLAX
Kwik Snax
Max Headroom
Meteor Storm
Mortal Kombat
Nodes of Yesod
Plum Duff
Punchy
Rasputin
Robocop
Robin of the Hood
RocMan
Shadow Skimmer
Skateboard Kidz
Splat!
Star Trek 5
SWIV
The Arc of Yesod
The Chess Player
The Last Corridor
The Running Man
Toi Acid Game
Treasure Island Dizzy
Twin Turbo V8
Twinz
Voice Chess
Yucan
Zoot

I've only just remembered Skateboard Kidz - the speech in that game was really scary - quite like Fantasy World Dizzy except it suddenly and interrupts the game while you're playing, just to make you jump.

There's also a game with a sample saying "Get ready, soldier". Does anyone know what game this is?

TMD2003 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 13, 2023 9:24 am What none of us knew at the time was that [Punchy] was a hasty retool of Hunchy, Mr. Micro's original unofficial Super Hunchback clone.

Blimey, I remember Punchy well (that junk came with my Speccy), but never knew about Hunchy. It's not as disturbing and scary as Punchy.

Strangely, in this video of Hunchy, the speech samples have reverb, which actually sounds great, though I suspect this is some emulator setting and doubt that was in the original game since it would surely be impossible.