I have written about the Sharp MZ-700 before: it was the first computer I ever used properly, I taught myself BASIC on it from the excellent manual and had my first experiments in Z80 machine code as well.
After a recently conversation on the Twitters about polyphonic music from the ZX Spectrum, I wondered what the humble MZ-700 would be capable of. Was it possible to abuse the same techniques as the Spectrum to produce more complex music or even play [sampled speech] …(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggX6dlinh-I).
“Best and Worst ZX Spectrum Games Speech” - the best is pretty good!
On the Beeb, there is the seldom-fitted optional TI speech chip, but there was also speech from the SN76489 sound chip - see for example Repton 3 - just keep hitting space bar to get through the instructions, and the splash screen has speech.
Maybe not quite samples but there were several packages for the Apple II (1Mhz 6502) to play speech and polyphonic music - which, given that all it had was a 1-bit output from a flip-flop and no form of hardware timing wasn’t that bad…
I remember Castle Wolfenstein being an Apple II game that had speech output (somewhat limited) and I also recall a program that was a demo of world flags plus national anthems, but I can’t find a reference to it online right now…
There was also a package called S.A.M. - Software Automated Mouth which could add speech to programs, but it needed an additional 8-bit DAC for the Apple II
The issue with samples on the old 8-bitters is always going to be RAM needed. One second of 8-bit audio at “telephone quality” of 8K samples/sec needs 8KB of RAM, so something has to give…
There’s an interview with Mark Barton, author of Software Automatic Mouth. It was pretty fascinating, given the history he had. He not only wrote S.A.M., but also the Mac’s (MacinTalk) and the Amiga’s speech synthesizer software (a port of the Mac’s software).
You’re right that the Apple II version needed a separate, plug-in DAC. He mentioned that. He also noted that he had to write his own sound driver for the other versions, the Atari 8-bit and C-64, because the sound hardware wasn’t good enough to do it itself. He said in fact that the Apple DAC had better sound quality than on the Atari and C-64. As I remember, he said the way he did it was very basic; modulating the volume control on the DAC in the Atari and C-64.
By coincidence I found some nice Commodore and other PDFs including this speech PDF for C64 and VIC-20. Chip is from GE.
Schematics, BASIC code and list of Allophones
A very nice book is The Complete Commodore Inner Space Anthology.
Interesting there is the 8050 RAM memory map with Zero Page contents at Power up (p 54).