My old PCs, Retro home made speech recognition system - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 02:23:31 am
content: Re: EEVblog #713 - VCP200 Voice Recognition - 1980's StyleThanks for the post! I Really enjoyed this video.Many years ago, before the first sound blaster card, I was attempting to make my own speech recognition system. I had seen speaker independent system at Western Electric/Bell Labs in the late 70's early 80s and became interested in it. I still have my home made board laying around. It may not work as good as the radio shack part.During my first job, we were making those LCP encoded speech modules for cars. I still have some old audio tapes from back then as companies were trying to come up with more natural sounds.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 02:27:29 am
content: Here is my original IBM AT 6MHz PC.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 02:31:07 am
content: 4096 Meg of RAM, coprocessor, original 32Meg full height drive and 80Meg HH. A work horse in the day....

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 02:35:07 am
content: I was very much interested in sound. It is pretty complex stuff to try and analyze. The Sound Blaster was not even though of yet. You had a speaker hooked to a timer channel. But IBM released the technical reference manual for the AT so you could make what ever hardware you wanted...

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 02:38:01 am
content: Back in those days, we didn't have fancy terms like Joule Thief. We just called them switching power supplies. Shown here is small home made E core.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 02:45:10 am
content: This board has several features. It has ROM that I would boot into that had a security system in it. There was no boot up passwords in those days and this may have been the first time it was done on an AT. There was a PROM and MC68701 programmer. An 8-bit DAC and a TI TMS5220 LPC speech chip, both connected to a mixer and a audio amplifier. The PCs speaker plugs into the board and the timer ties into the mixer so I didn't loose my beeps.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 02:55:51 am
content: In order to digitize the speech, I have two different ADCs. One was a National ADC0809 and the other an AD7523.My plan, assuming the PC still runs, is to make a short video showing some of the speech software I wrote for fun. Mostly was using assembler back then with a little C mixed in. I suspect is was no better than what was shown in the EEVBlog.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 04:12:33 am
content: Turned it on after looking it over. Ran a few seconds and died. Power supply was dead shorted. Looks like the 80Meg hard drive failed. Stupid Tant cap is my guess. Not going to be a simple demo.....

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 04:32:40 am
content: Stupid Tant caps... Always such a nice smell. Of course there appears to be a memory fault too. All the DIP switches, no BIOS setups, SLOW, yea we have it so nice now!

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 04:34:20 am
content: That's too new for me, I would rather had the original one with the cassette din on the back.I made a program that will read ZX Spectrum tapes into the PC, mostly in assembly to respect the timings and C to for the DOS program that will ask you what to do. I still have it somewhere (the program not the pc)But with the ZX Spectrum I recorded every Spanish phoneme and made a text to speach, never tried it the other way around because that is way harder

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 05:53:41 am
content: Quote from: miguelvp on March 10, 2015, 04:34:20 amI'm right there with you! I have my original IBM PC that had it's black 40W power supply and tape drive interface. Then they start to get really old. Oldest dates to early 70s. Magnetic core memory. CPU is two large boards of TTL logic.Looks like it was just the one bad Tant. Replaced it and put a new battery pack into the system. No BIOS setup on this PC. But at least it's not DIP switches like the PC was. Fired up Speedstor and ran some more diagnostics. Things are starting to look up for a demo.Video showing the first power on attempt...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju96T2SPcMA&feature=youtu.be

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2015, 07:10:43 am
content: Changed out the second battery for the security and can log in with the board installed now. Looks like the old wire wrap board is still alright. Next problem, no network, no USB, no CDR and no way to put the software on it except 5.25 disks or mag tape.Now wheres the box of tapes....

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2015, 03:37:56 am
content: I found all my old speech software but have not located the harness for the board yet that has the microphone.You forget how bad things were until you fire up an old PC. After getting the PC running again, I went ahead and ran a low format and a media analysis before I start loading the software on. It's been running at least 8 hours and is still not done. On the bright side, it's been running about 8 hours!

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2015, 05:14:18 am
content: So far, looking like the PC held up better than your, I'm assuming much newer, monitor!Damn, 80 megabytes on that sucker! Not to mention the EMS cards! This thing wasn't cheap to assemble, back in the day, was it?Should boot up my 8086 (PC-XT, late model clone) one of these days... I basically never do anything embedded though, so I have no real reason. Maybe I should put together a video and demonstrate some of the programs I wrote back then...Tim

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2015, 05:44:24 am
content: DosBox runs most of those old programs if you don't need to interface with anything like the OP has to.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2015, 11:43:37 am
content: Quote from: miguelvp on March 11, 2015, 05:44:24 amI use DOSBOX even for real work. Between it and Oracle's VirtualBox, you can keep most of the old software running.It would be easier for me to rewrite the code to run on a modern PC with a modern sound card using Windows graphics than get this system working again.Quote from: T3sl4co1l on March 11, 2015, 05:14:18 amI have both the original IBM CGA and monochrome boards and IBM CGA monitor. The PC is fitted with a Triton VGA board now.The one board can support expanded or extended memory. The other board only supports expanded and actually has a daughter board that doubles it's memory.If you wrote anything for an XT box, let's see it. My PC is a first gen and does not have the hooks in the BIOS to support a hard drive. You get two 360K floppy drives to compile your C programs.It finished scanning the media overnight and has completed the high level formatting. Now how to get the software on it.....

author: Aaron D. Parks
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2015, 05:07:25 pm
content: Delightful! Thanks for sharing.Good luck getting it running

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2015, 05:49:08 am
content: I kept hoping that the cable with the microphone would show up. That's been two moves ago and I think it's gone for good. I wanted to at least test some of the board out.I connected my little HP signal generator to the boards input and tried to capture it. This is what 8-bits or under sampled data looks like with CGA graphics all written in assembler. I found my old Radio Shack microphone and now need to make up a cable for it.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2015, 04:48:20 am
content: In this video, I state that the software is written in assembler. This is correct for the first program. The second is written in C. I was attempting to get something working using zero crossing like Dave's demo but was unable to pull it off. I switched to C and it appears put a strain on the system requirements....http://youtu.be/N85dGIrcT5EIt won't be long now........

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2015, 12:27:43 am
content: I had a few more problems getting the system working. The ADC had a stuck bit and the supplies had too much noise. I added some filters to the old wire wrap board and finally got it all to work. The video is short but I explain how it works and show it in operation.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnkUPFOw_Yo&feature=youtu.be

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2015, 11:42:49 pm
content: After seeing another member post about trying to get their IBM 5150 running, decided to pull mine out and see if it would still run.This one is a little unique. It's an early version with the black supply, has an original IBM memory card and a Z80 processor allowing it to run CPM OS.Here's a few pictures of it.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2015, 04:53:23 am
content: Video of the system checkout and boot. Was able to get CPM running on it.

author: IanJ
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 20, 2015, 10:47:25 am
content: Great thread guys......loving the old photos and tales.Back in the day at work I was tasked with migrating all the doc files from the companies old CPM system over to our new IBM PCAT system (non-networked).Of course the floppies etc were incompatible, so I did it via a serial cable I made up and using some kind of SEND command on the CPM system and a terminal program on the AT. Took hours sending them one at a time. Lucky for me though they were readable directly in Wordstar 6.0 on the AT.That was my introduction to IBM/MS DOS.TeleVideo TS-803 terminalIan.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2015, 12:03:21 pm
content: Nice Televideo! Where would we be without Wordstar?I found a program years later that would move data between CPM and DOS.Here's the PC running the 8088MPH demo after I figured out I needed DOS 3 to run it. The PC does not have all 640K installed and seems to run it fine. I need to get it hooked to the composite output and try it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QooSmcknY4&feature=youtu.be

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 21, 2015, 03:23:25 am
content: Connected the IBM's composite output to my trash pick LCD projector. Ran a few programs like the original Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 before running the 8088MPH demo. The colors look very impressive.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RqZCWyjrfY&feature=youtu.be

author: IanJ
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 21, 2015, 10:42:53 am
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 21, 2015, 03:23:25 amWhilst you are at it, can you run up a version of XtreeGold.......would love to see that app again.......Ian.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 21, 2015, 12:35:36 pm
content: I was using it when I was working on the old AT. I think they made a lot of these old programs available now for free. You could fire up DOSBOX and load your copy of XTREE or XTG and really experience DOS all over again.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2015, 02:43:55 am
content: My old Televideo TS803 Z80 CPM machine. They offered this same machine with an 8088 and DOS. It was pretty high tech and I think it may have even had a hard drive option. Been too long. I'll see if I can dig up the disks for it and check it out. Needs a good cleaning first.There's your Xtree Gold manual in all it's glory.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2015, 01:53:21 am
content: Cleaned up the Televideo and checked it out. Video of it booting up and running the demo, a tank game and WordStar. I say in the video I have had it for 20 years but I believe it has been almost 25. It came from where my wife was working at the time. They were switching out their PCs and scrapped the old ones. They offered to let me take what I wanted. I saw this old 803 with the manuals and disks and grabbed it. It was old back then and I didn't want to see it hauled to the dump.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yLpcpGVpNE&feature=youtu.be

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2015, 03:20:56 am
content: Here are a few pictures of a simple DAQ board I wire wrapped for the IBM PC in the 80s. Some opto-isolators and an 8-bit ADC. Heatsink is from what would have been a vintage computer even back then.Interesting enough is there is no bypass at all on this board. I believe I made this board to life test some large relays.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2015, 02:58:25 am
content: My Thinker Toys Keyed-Up 8080 S-100 computer. Original box, manuals, picture business card from sales.