Speak to Me! - Speech Synthesis with Early Home Video Games

When considering the evolution of video game audio, of the three components of audio, sound effects, music and speech, those components were introduced into video games in that order.  The earliest video games generated simple tones and noise to produce simple sound effects.  Music chips were well developed by the late 1970s, bringing a slightly more sophisticated method of sound generation to video game players.  Speech, which requires the utilization of more complex sounds to be intelligible, tended to be brought to home consoles and computers in the form of specialized speech chips.  In this article we will trace some of the lineages of speech in early video games.  

Batty over Bits - The Complexity of the Intellivision's Memory Layout

The Atari 2600 had a rather conventional design by later home computer standards.  It's CPU, the 6507, had an 8-bit data bus and a 13-bit addressing bus.  Whatever it did, it did in multiples of 8-bits, which has become the accepted standard for computer design.  But its' main competitor, the Mattel Intellivision, has a memory architecture remarkably more complex than its older rival as well as many successive home consoles.  Even most later 16-bit systems do everything in 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit etc.  It is important for anyone wanting to get into Intellivision to understand why it is different.  In this short blog post, I will try to explain those differences.

The Intellivision Amico - Can a "Family Friendly" Console Succeed?

The Intellivision Amico in Metallic Pearl, courtesy of Intellivision Entertainment

Who remembers the Intellivision today?  Some readers with a sense of history will remember the console as the first console to seriously compete with Atari 2600 before the video game crash of 1983-84.  A few may even have had one when they were younger, have one in their collection or played one at some point in their lives.  To the general public, also-ran pre-crash consoles like the Intellivision barely register in its memory.  Intellivision is posed to make a comeback with the Amico console, a console built with the laudable goal of getting families to play video games together.  But it is a very different market that Intellivision is trying to make a splash compared to ten years ago, never mind forty.  Can the Amico become a success when it is scheduled to launch next year?  Let's explore its prospects in this article.