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I was trying to figure out what was going on with emulation of the Texas Instruments talking games, such as Speak & Spell. The last thing I could find was "Speak and Spell" (rom is typed in from patent, could use verification; assisting wilbert pol on driver)" from Lord Nightmares page, which looked like it hadn't been updated since 2010. I'm not wanting to know when it will be done, just more cdurious into looking how it is progressing.

I admire the programming and the hobiests that have taken on this huge undertaking. I want to learn how to emulate and program, but I am thinking the Speak and Spell is probably something more in the advanced world of things. I've been looking at the source code check-ins most of the more popular hardware pre-dates the online sourcecode repository. Does anyone know of a simple system that has recently been added that I could look over?

Lord Nightmare is the expert on all things speech, but I honestly don't think a Speak and Spell is going to be that bad as far as the complexity of emulating it. I of course could be wrong

Thanks R. Belmont. That be great if it isn't? Still be probably better to do as recommended at least on the MAME side, and attempt to emulate something that has already been done and see how close you come to what they did. Rinse and repeat till your stuff starts closely resembling the completed stuff. But, knowing good examples to do that with elude me.

I don't think that matching existing drivers should really be the goal - for one thing a lot of them are done in an older style that we try to discourage. I'll make the same suggestion I make to everyone, including some experienced devs who need to catch up: watch the SVN commits by Curt Coder. Everything he's done for the last year or so has been in the modern C++ style and extremely cleanly done for the most part.

I'm not saying that others don't do stuff in the same modern style, but Curt's stuff tends to be almost clinically clean, like textbook examples.

I should ask: what's your background with computers? Have you done any assembly programming, or just C/C++?

I earned by computer science degree in 98. I started off in a support role however troubleshooting, before becoming a programmer (maintenance), then moved on to initial development. I have done some assembly programming but not a whole lot primarily c/c++ though I do enjoy assembly very very much. Reading through it and stuff. Machine language however is very discouraging and hard for me to read.

Enjoying assembly means you absolutely have the right mindset to program emulation

Drivers in MAME/MESS are generally modular; you pull in the CPU you need and then define what exists at each address the CPU can access (RAM, ROM, or I/O devices, usually).

My understanding was that the microcontroller in the Speak & Spell contains internal rom that would require decapping to read out. There's a test mode for the chip mentioned in the patent that would allow reading of the internal rom but I haven't seen any mention of anybody getting that to work on a real chip.

See: http://www.mess.org/dumping:have
Under Lord Nightmare's section it says the mcu dump is still missing.

Ahh, well, that's a problem

@RB: As for catching up ... would the C64 implementation serve as a suitable template to get rid of LEGACY_*?

Is there some useful programming guide apart from the sources? Sources are not the fastest way to understand new structures.

Michael

The C64 driver itself is not terribly modern, although the devices are (especially the 1541 disk drive). For a nice short example of a modern #define ADDRESS_MAP_MODERN driver which does most of the useful things at least once, mess/drivers/acrnsys1.c is a decent example.