Kudos to your daughter for going along with her nerdy Dad's weird experiments, she sings far better than the computer hums along!

“Stay awhile, stay forever” was mind blowing when I first heard it. I couldn’t imagine how the computer made it.

"Another visitor. Stay awhile... Stay forever!". That introduction gave me chills every time.

The person who made the Voice Harp Recorder program (the humming one), Donald X. Vaccarino, is also the board game designer behind the massively popular game Dominion. It was neat to see his name in the credits at 13:23. He also wrote the manual: "I originally wrote a funny manual for that program. And they laughed and laughed but said, well obviously this joke and this joke have got to go. So I edited them out and made whatever other changes and they proofread it again and said, oh hey we can't really have this joke or this joke. After four or fives passes of this I went through and removed all of the jokes. They were sad and the manual was done."

Congrats on being the first pratt in the USA to reverse that recording! Kind regards, Perifractic - the first pratt in the UK to do it back then

16:49 Sounds so realistic! It's like I'm right there at the drive tru.

The best way I can describe the Voicemaster's "hum-along" mode is off-key digital farting. But maybe it's a lullaby for dial-up modems!

Finding a new 8-Bit Guy video on KZfaq is like finding a bucket of ice cubes in the desert. Always makes my day :)

Arthur Smith, (Red Dwarf Man) can actually speak backwards. He showed his talents on an episode of QI!

I loved the voice harp. Sounds pretty much like when I sing along to something.

15:23 Hey, the return of the infamous paperclip. Glad to see it back 😁

If you want something that samples properly and has the look and feel of an 80's computer then a Roland S50/330/550/7XX is a must, the S50/550/330 is 12bit and the 7xx are 16bit. The 12bit line come with a monitor port (DIGITAL RGB (that can be easily converted to SCART and monochrome composite)as standard and can even be controlled with an MSX mouse.

I was obsessed with this stuff when I was a kid, of course I wanted the computer to speak and listen to me. I had saved and saved and got a voicemaster for c64, hearsay 1000 and later the PC version of the voicemaster. I had hours of fun... unfortunate it took about 30 years for them to talk back a little more intelligently. Great video!

I bought this (voice Master, C64) for my hard earned money as a teenager in the mid 80's. It was very cool, I still have audio recordings of people from back then. I still got it. Mine is an aluminium box instead of plastic.

The Intellivision had an expansion module called the Intellivoice that gave digital playback of speech samples for certain games, such as "B-17 Bomber."

My boyfriend is a huge fan of Red Dwarf, and he's gotten me into it as well. I did realise that the stuff being said in "Backwards" would probably be real sentences, but I've actually never tried reversing it myself. It was fun to hear that particular little clip :)

It's a family affair! The 8-Bit Guy, The Next Generation. Or, should we call her the 16-Bit Gal? She can specialize in neo-Retro from the late '90s.

That is one of my favourite episodes of Red Dwarf! The voice recognition was much better than I thought it would be for the 80s.

There was also an episode of the GI Joe cartoon from the Eighties where Destro said a line backwards - when i reversed it, it said something like: "Anybody who took the time to reverse this is a real dweeb." LOL. Thanks for the video 8-Bit Guy. :)

Absolutely awesome episode! I've always been fascinated by these ancient sound digitizers, never had the chance to mock around with 'em when i was a kid...Thank you for this retro thrill, dude! 👍

There is a kind of having fun with the samplers and reversed sound that many people came up on their own: record a phrase, reverse it, listen to it, and try to mimick it with your voice as close as possible on another record, then reverse that. The result often sound pretty fun.

To this day, I remember being amazed by the voice synth my dad added to the Ti99/4a. It blew me away back then.

10:50 Hoped for a "Cheating bitch" bit there. :)

I found this channel because of 8-Bit Keys and I miss seeing a new video pop up on a keyboard I hadn't heard of 😭🙏 Still love all the videos, and I'm glad to see any video of 8-Bit Guy's on my feed. Keep it up!

On my Acorn Atom (a 1979 British 6502-based computer, the direct forerunner of the BBC Micro), a short type-in program was published that let you digitise a few seconds of audio via the cassette port, so you could plug in a microphone instead of the tape deck and record your own voice. The audio was digitised into the 6K available just above screen memory. The quality was pretty awful, you could just make out your voice under a sea of noise, but it was still mind-blowing at the time.

Heck yea. Used to go dumpster diving back with a buddy in the 90s at a couple places that would throw away a lot of old electronics from the 80s at the time and came across a DECtalk Express. Although we discovered it after its time, it was still awesome to play with and made me appreciate the innovation of sound cards.

Haven't been able to watch a vid by you in a while, I'm excited for this one especially!!

Oh wow! Super cool! I miss more music stuff like this! Great demo of these rare products! Also ur daughter has an awesome voice and it was cool seeing her for the first time!

I wasn't actually expecting a Red Dwarf reference today, but I am glad there was. Oh, one thing you might find amusing is that over here in the UK, on the DVD release of Backwards, one of the DVD extras was the entire episode of Backwards in reverse.

19:59 I had almost the same idea as a kid, but with an inverted color image that I saw in a magazine. I scanned this and was happy when I applied the "inverse color" option and the original colors showed up.

Thank you for sharing this. Older technology - sound and video cards in particular - get my attention and are an interesting topic to dig into. And the intro music to your channel is fantastic! Take care!

David! What a great episode. I always enjoy and look forward to your content!

I used the ZX Spectrum's mic socket for sampling in the mid 80's. It sounded decent, I would record chunks of songs into memory then save them to Microdrive. I could then load the chunks back in to play the full song. a 3 min track would be about 80K.

Your daughter has a pretty great singing voice, although the computer does not seem to comprehend that

You da man! Thanks for the awesome vid! Knowledge drop from all this stuff that I was too young to be in to back in the day is much appreciated... One of my fave episodes of Red Dwarf BTW!

I enjoy watching your videos. Takes me back to my jrhs days. BTW happy new year.

I wish I had played with sound more on my C64. Back in the day. The coolest thing I ever did with sound was to activate a keychain. I had a keychain that would say "I love you" when you whistled at the right pitch. I could never whistle so I wrote a C64 program to cycle thru all the sound frequencies until I found the range that would work. When I played the sound on the C64 the keychain would do its thing. My parents and friends were VERY impressed. Ah the good old days.

That Red Dwarf clip at the end got me! I've seen that episode 100 times and I never even considered reversing the audio! That was absolutely classic! Thank you so much for that! Lol!

This moment at 9:58 when your C64 can understand you better, than my PS4 with fancy headset can understand me. 😬

These devices were clearly pushing the boundaries of what could be done with 1Mhz microcomputers. Imagine what could have followed if they then had been upgraded to be slightly more capable. But incremental upgrades weren't really a thing at the time; everyone tended to create whole new platforms instead.

this reminds me of an AVGN episode.. 'mattel electronics presents BEEYSEVUNTEEYN BAWMURR!!!'

I remember when I got one for my amiga 500 back in the day to use with octamed. We were impressed back then with such things. How simple it seems now 😂

5:00 I wasn't expecting this level of agression from 8-bit guy

Had exactly the same experience of sampling and reversing the Red Dwarf clips on our Amiga. The hardware was a Sound Express (parallel port), and I think we blew the right channel trying to plug it into the phone line. Glory Days!

Absolutely fabulous; the amount of time that I used, dooling in SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) on C64 means, that I'd have been using even longer on mucking around with recordings. The Doctor Who and Red Dwarf findings is the cherry on top.

The C64 datasette actually was a 1bit sound digitizer. A magazine back in the day had a small listing that allowed you to sample snippets from cassette tapes. There even was a diagram on where on the datasette's PCD to solder two leads so you could attach an external microphone. Lots of fun.

It's being a while but I am glad to see the 8 Bit Guy back showing his technical knowledge again.

Oooh I've been waiting for this for a minute. Thanks for sharing sir!!

I was born in 1989, so this stuff is all new to me. It's amazing how much we take these things for granted now because everything is integrated on the motherboard. This is why I love this channel though. Learning about all the old, obsolete tech, really makes me appreciate my computer more.

Holy crap! The Commodore Composer was programmed by Donald Vaccarino. The game designer of Dominion, the first ever deck building game. How weird is that?

Love the videos. Big props to your daughter for putting her voice on the web! Great pipes!

Dude!! I missed your videos buddy! Glad you're back! That's soon good nostalgic content right there! It's crazy how much technology has changed over the years. All these "expander packs" and cartridges to get a bit more out of your system. It seems like everything has went back to the way they used to be with massive components.. (especially video cards)

Your daughter sings very well. Loved this episode, the message from red dwarf was amazing

Watching you put on that headset put a smile on my face lol. I had headphones that had that similar way of adjusting with the metal parts sticking out lol

Thank you for yet another great, in-depth video!! I'd love to know more about the Commodore FM Sound Module and Magic Voice Cartridge someday!!!

I was thinking about the Red Dwarf episode as you were talking about Dr Who. Being a big RD fan, and very much aware of Arthur Smith's message, I had a good chuckle to myself when you said that you actually reversed his little insult!! Nice one :o)

I can't remember which machine I had (Spectrum 128K or Atari STE maybe), but I remember reversing the Red Dwarf episode and also being impressed. I remembered it the moment you spoke about Dr Who!

4:18 its not Christmas anymore!! Lol

Love your daughters voice! I owned the technosound sampler for the Amiga and loved playing with that. There were several sampler software programs out there that could distort your voice like transposing up and down, dalek robot sound etc.

Keep the videos coming, love your work!

There is a system that came with a package called Softspeak which was on all of the PC Plus Superdiscs which said "Welcome to the PC Plus Superdisc" and also had the digitizer to allow you to create the sound files which could be turned into self playing files which played through the PC speaker.

Voice recognition is kind of a tricky thing to do, especially with the 8-bit computers, since obviously, RAM capacity is limited as you already know, so it had to make do with simple spoken commands so it can actually do something without eating up all the RAM space. Nowadays we got decent flexibility due to both improved AI processing and obviously gigabytes of RAM (it's mind-blowing to see smartphones now sporting up to 16 - 20 GB of RAM compared to the 64 to 256 MB back in the early days of smartphones).

I reversed clips from that episode of Red Dwarf, it felt like the actor were talking to me & I was in wondrous amazement & I loved it!😊 I predicted you would mention the Red Dwarf episode when you were talking about the 70's episode of Doctor Who.

Glad to see more stuff coming from you! Honestly, my favorite is the SFX Sound Sampler. It's got the best audio quality, and it doesn't have a bunch of useless gimmick demos.

"Backwards" was one of my favorite Red Dwarf episodes, absolutely brilliant.

When my mother first heard my Apple ][+ talk back in the 80s, she was totally amazed. Now, she talks and listens to her cell phone. Times have sure changed.

Whoa, fantastic stuff. I'm with you, had a sampler (no idea what type it was) for the Amiga, and used the heck out of it to make soundtracker mods with. That easter egg in Red Dwarf "Backwards", oh my goodness! How did you even think to do that? Hilarious, and brilliant.

I used to want one of these so bad! It's very interesting to see their capabilities in hindsight of current technologies. Thanks for the continuing trip down nostalgia lane!

The fact that they made the backwards audio an easter egg is absolutely brilliant

I love, Red Dwarf, especially the first 2 or 3 seasons. One of my favorites is when they go into a video game and make each other miserable.

2:12 I would love to see all 3 daisy chained and see if they all work.

I was into UV etching my own PCB designs in those days & with a few friends that were also into electronics we built several different mono audio samplers for the C64 using different ADC ICs before settling on a design we were happy with. We ended up with two versions, one that cost about £10 that gave pretty decent results and one for about £35 that was built inside cheap Tandy/Radio Shack two channel audio mixer units. The manager of our local Radio Shack store eventually asked what we were doing with them when we bought all the two channel mixers they had in stock and asked when they would get more. It turned out the manager and a couple of the staff also had C64s and bought 3 samplers from us ! We gave them a 'discount' in the hope we might get the next batch we bought at a lower price, I ended up getting staff discount on a whole bunch of stuff from that store. Oh what Fun!

I was so impressed with the voice clips in Impossible Mission and Ghostbusters back in the 80s. I had experimented with programming musical notes on the C64 and just assumed it was a very complicated form of that, somehow! 😂

I'm actually quite surprised by the speech recognition capabilities! Nice job 8-Bit Daughter!

Love the 8 bit guy! Cool story about reversing the dialogue :D

After suffering through overly long, complicated youtube video openings, I have to compliment you on your perfectly made intro. It's got all the info you need to know what's going to be happening, and it's just the right length - 10 seconds. Thanks for not wasting my time.

4:55 So true

I had the Voice Master for the Atari and yes they did put that adjustment tool in every box. Memory space for the audio file was a big issue, so you couldn't include too many sounds in any program that you created.

dude yes. this episode was great! Please do more samplers!

Watching 8-Bit Guy before sleeping, putting headphones in, arranging blanked and pillow nicely, and being eager to enjoy great content, all of a sudden I hear 3 knocks, I rip out my headphones, jump up from bed, my heartbeat went up a few notches and looking around to what caused this. While I was looking at the door, checking if anything fell down, running through every room to see what might have caused the sound, I realized it could also be the video... ( 0:58 ) So I just wanted to thank you for my late night cardio, my heart works :D 10/10 would recommend as personal trainer. :D (just wanted to share this funny story, no critique)

So cool seeing a kalimba out of nowhere. What a great instrument, easy to learn, cheap and can be hold like a gamepad. Tetris theme here i go again... :D

After hearing the Covox Voicemaster, it reminded me of the railroad defect detectors that broadcasted over the air to alert of any axle over temps or dragging equipment. This makes me wonder if the companies that built them used the same chips that were in the Convex. This may not be too much of a stretch since companies like to use more off-the-shelf components to build their products.

Great review! Back in the days I would see these devices in the magazines, and imagine all the fun and productivity I would have using them. It appears my expectations were a bit higher than what they delivered.

"Another visitor! Stay a while! Stay.. FOREVER" is one of my favorite catch phrases that dates my age almost immediately when no one understands what I am talking about.

That was a fun episode. Thanks for doing it.

I love that you started with Ghostbusters and Impossible Mission. We had both those games for our C64 as well as Kennedy Approach, which my father played a lot of. That was a air traffic control simulator where the game would use speech synthesis to repeat back your commands like a controller speaking to the aircraft.

I remember having the voicemaster, it was fun for a while.

17:24 You should probably try with a sinewave instead, should probably be easier for it to figure out the right octave (for obvious reasons...)

Excellent video, Keep up the good work.

I got my first audio digitizer on my Commodore Amiga too in the 80s and it was really good! Used it for fun and to record sounds for public performances, like a Patch the Pirate children's musical at our church. The Amiga did a great job of multitasking the playback of the sound samples, so I could have crickets playing back multiple times with each mouse click, over both the left and right channels of the auditorium's sound system which made it sound so real! The kids and the parents loved the effects it added! PS. Love Red Dwarf! Was hilarious seeing the lady un-eat the hotdog and you being the first one in the states to hear what they were actually saying!

Aren't the analog cassette input's (on an Apple II, for example) technically audio inputs tho?

I had build my own sampler for my C64 from a magazine called "64'er" edition 10/86 . It was cheap and works very fine. I had so much fun 😀

13:00 chose the perfect time to come in and pet the cat while this was playing on my phone lol

Another new 8-bit Guy video in my recommendations when I wake up usually means today = good day. This instalment did not disappoint! Interesting content, well presented. What I do wonder is, when are we going to see a new episode of 8-Bit Keys? It's been a long time. Just hinting......

The SID has Audio In but that function was never implemented on the C64 or as I can tell the C128. In fact the original C64s did not have pin 26 of the Original 6581 connected to anything. Furthermore the C64 memory map of the time shows a couple blank/unassigned registers inside the SID's space. Could they have been for the Audio In? I know that most of the older C64s with the "long board" with the composite video did not connect this pin. The later long boards with the Chroma/Lumina pins may have connected it to something - but where. Not to the video jack even though it says "Audio In". The short boards with the 8580 like on the 64C - I know nothing about. It maybe connected to the video port or not. A lot of games that has digitized voices, like Impossible Mission, Ghost Busters, Beach Head and others were done on a keyboard synthesizer and the data pumped into the computer's memory. M.U.L.E uses this technique for its music track to make it sound like the machine has more than three voice/sound tracks by multiplexing the sound and pumping in the resulting data through the system's sound chip.

Can you chain those three sound cartridges together?

this was a very entertaining episode. thanks!

Thanks for this. I remember lusting after this thing (I'm pretty sure they advertised a VIC-20 model). I remember mentally computing how many days of delivering newspapers it would take to get it, and how cool it would be to talk to my computer.. but the VoiceMaster retailed for more than $100, too rich for my blood back then. Thank goodness I didn't; I would have been a bit heartbroken. But it's great to finally see what it was!

Speech recognition was actually fairly advanced back then. Very interesting!

That is very interesting, I wonder if similar digitizers exists for PCs with PC Speaker only