Image: github.com · GitHub repository card for WokenBits/mikropuhe
A 1990 Finnish speech synthesiser running again
Mikropuhe, an MS-DOS speech synthesiser, brought back to modern systems with REA as the way into the binary.
Credits
The full story
MikroPuhe was a Finnish text-to-speech program for MS-DOS from 1990 by Timehouse Oy, with three voices (Janne, Kristian and Sophia) that spoke through the PC speaker. This project, puhu, is a new C program written from a study of the original. It reads the original voice files and says the same things in the same voices, sample for sample, on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Checked against the original running in an emulator, the text handling matches in all 89 test inputs. The audio is byte-identical in 86, and the other three differ only where the original reads uninitialised memory. The full-screen interface matches too, and a new synthetic voice, Kone, was added.
How it was done
Tools
Themes
Loading themes…
Sources
From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.
- Awesome REA list: mikropuheRepository account: WokenBits
The program, with how it was checked against the original and how to run it.