Assembly Language

S.A.M. HANDLER

by Chris Bone

Owners of S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) can use this program to define the voice synthesizer as an I/O device-much like a printer.  This allows you to program S.A.M. commands with less typing.  This BASIC program will run on all Atari computers of any memory configuration-but you need S.A.M. software and a disk drive.  Antic Disk subscribers, load S.A.M. and RECITER, then RUN "D:SAMHANDL,BAS".

S.A.M. (Tronix, $59.95) is the sole software-only voice synthesizer for Atari computers.  It costs considerably less than "black box" synthesizer hardware and sounds just about as good.  With a little experience, you can understand just about everything S.A.M. says.
  It's somewhat cumbersome to use, though-you must enter speech into a string, then execute a USR call.
  This program makes using S.A.M. a good deal easier, and even adds a few extra capabilities.  Type in Listing 1, check it with TYPO, and SAVE a copy.  You don't need to type Listing 2 (SAMHANDL.ASM on the Antic disk) in order to use the program.  Listing 2 shows the source code for the machine language portion of the BASIC program.
  First load S.A.M. and RECITER according to the S.A.M. documentation.  Then load the S.A.M. Handler and RUN it.
  The program sets up a handler to allow the Operating System to treat S.A.M. as any other Input/Output device.  To "speak," all you need to do is OPEN a channel for output to device V: (voice) (e.g. OPEN #1,8,0,"V:") and anything printed to that channel (such as: PRINT #1:"HELLO") is spoken by S.A.M.!
  Now you can also have S.A.M. read out a program listing by LOADing the program, then executing LIST "V: ".  I use this to have S.A.,M. read long DATA statements that I've typed in from published listings, while I check the statements on the printed page.  This saves much of the time and frustration that's usually involved in checking a program.
  The S.A.M. Handler remains active as long as you don't turn off the computer or press [RESET]. if the latter occurs, reinitialize the handler by executing A=USR(1536).

PROGRAM TAKE-APART

This take-apart refers to the assembly language portion of the S.A.M. handler, Listing 2.

150- 410  Initialize the handler.
430-1020  The handler itself.  Lines 620-690 check for an end-of-line character, and if found, place a period at the end of the text to allow S.A.M.'s voice to drop in inflection and to speak the contents of the buffer.
710- 750  Check for comma and, if found, send a space after the comma.  This is necessary for DATA lines, because if there are numbers on both sides of a comma, S.A.M. normally doesn't recognize it.

Chris Bone is one of Antic's readers from England, from Watford, Herts., to be exact

Program Listings:
Listing 1: SAMHANDL.BAS Download

Listing 2: SAMHANDL.ASM Download / View