The dongle connects to a speaker powered by a 9v battery, and device has active circuitry that is powered from the speaker. FTL's device could be detected by Dungeon Master, a standard Covox device cannot be detected.Īround the same time (1990), Disney Software released an inexpensive parallel port device called the Disney Sound Source. Rather weirdly for a game designed for mouse input, the adapter had a DE-9 port to plug in an Atari joystick, which presumably used the input lines of the parallel port. There are schematics available online which you can use to build your own Speech Thing with only a few dollars worth of resistors and a DB-25 connector and shell.įTL released a version of Dungeon Master with a Covox-style parallel port DAC. There is nothing special about the Covox Speech Thing, it should consist of purely passive components and the functionality behind the device was widely cloned. The one with the white shell has a 3.5mm and a 2.5mm output jack, the one with a gray shell only has the 3.5mm jack and it is larger, so it is probably an older variant.Ī sample of what the Speech Thing sounds like can be heard in this video : Īs the Speech Thing is a parallel port device, games that support it will typically allow it to be selected at LPT1-3, depending on which device name the BIOS uses for each parallel port it detects in the system. In fact, I do not know of any games supporting this device until 1990.Ī true Covox Speech Thing came in at least the two varieties shown here : The methods used to create digitized sound on the PC speaker or Tandy 3-voice chip have similar performance issues. Typically 11kHz was considered the standard for comprehensible human speech, and the resulting performance impact on the IBM PCs of the day was considerably high. However, it was purely software driven, the CPU had to feed the DAC bytes at a certain sampling rate to allow for convincing digitized sound. This device was supposedly released around 1986. The 8 data bits of the parallel port would pass through a resistor network and then to an audio output jack. This was a parallel port dongle that functioned as a digital to analog converter.

One of Covox's original PC products was the Covox Speech Thing. There was a version for the Apple II and the Atari 8-bit computers and the Commodore 64. One of its first products was called the Covox Voice Master. had a niche throughout the 80s and early 90s for making devices that could support some type of speech with home computers.

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