I have seen a few questioning postings on Chesster, which I will address.
But first I wanted to talk about the start of Talking Chess Computers.
In early 1979, in one of my Design Electronics magazines, I read about a Talking Calculator for the blind. The article explained how Dr. Forrest Mozer had invented a voice compression algorithm and had the algorithm designed into a dedicated chip. I told Sid Samole and he contacted Dr. Mozer and arranged a meeting with him at UC Berkley in California. We had a wonderful meeting, and worked out a deal with him and TeleSensory Systems to buy the voice chip. The voice data was in an external ROM and I worked on making the chess voice vocabulary, sent it to Dr. Mozer, who used his equipment to create the ROM data and sent it to me for testing and masking. I also eventually did the same in French, Spanish & German.
Texas Instruments was working and introducing their own talking product, Speak & Spell, at about this same time. Dr. Mozer’s compression was done in the Time Domain and Texas Instruments was done in the Frequency Domain.
This explained why TI’s was a little more human sounding compared to Dr Mozer’s Cylon Robotic voice.
If you are interested in a detailed reading on the Talking Calculator here is a link:
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/ ... eech-.html
Fast forward to 1989, Kathy wanted to develop something along the educational lines for computer chess. So she started creating a script of what could be said during a game of chess.
I received her script and we had a marketing meeting, where I presented the idea. It was liked but they wanted more personality with perhaps a wisecracker persona. Names were thrown out and Chesster was a favorite.
All during the discussion, Teri Everett (the first Chess Challenger sales person hired after the CES in 1976), who is a doodler, showed the impish figure she had doodled on her note pad. It was the graphic we used for Chesster.
(off topic, Teri was very capable and was Sid Samole’s protégé. When H & G bought Fidelity, she was passed over to run the company (perhaps because she was a woman) a big mistake in my opinion.)
For the voice system, I again went back to Dr. Mozer. He had started a company call Sensory, Inc, which was now run by his son Todd. But instead of a chip, they now offered a 65c02 software solution.
That was an ideal solution for me, so all was in place but….H & G bought Fidelity. Kathy told me she would not work for a company who called their product The Devil (Mephisto)…
and Saitek made Kathy & Dan an offer to work on a Spark CPU to compete in the World Micro Chess Computer Tournament and win back their title. So no Kathy to do the programming.
So Sid asked me if I could do it. Of course I said yes, and it was my first project in to my 12 month contract. It was not easy, as I had mentioned the Spracklen 6502 code had very few comments, so it was not easy designing a voice system that melded into a chess engine.
I came up with a clever software scheme where the voice events were coded in line with the code, and not arranged in tables. The scheme was designed for 4 languages.
I finished the English and I believe it went into production.
Then I started the French & Spanish, but H & G wanted Kishon to do the German translation and actual recording. While still in development, Helmut Wiegel, from H & G, came over to the USA to start testing the German portion.
I had designed an Apple development system to display all voice as text. So he spent a number of days with me testing and modifying the German voice design.
Helmut liked the development system and wanted to continue testing back in Germany. So I was commissioned to build a second unit and bring it to Munich.
I did and my trip to Germany led me to two projects for H & G, which I want to write about in a separate post.
Helmut Wiegel was the product developer for Tiny Chess, Fidelity imported from H & G. Helmut and I talked about that product, since I was impressed by it. He told me he hired a software company (of two I think) in Belgium to write the software for the single chip.
One of my last projects at Fidelity/H&G was Little Chesster. The goal was to cost reduce Chesster.
The LCD was eliminated, a single chip MCU with external Rom & Ram was used. A three chip solution which allowed a single sided PCB for further cost savings.
The engine & voice code of Chesster was preserved but some of the voice data was removed since it wasn’t used.
Fast forward to 1996, where I am working for Excalibur Electronics. I had finished my H8 chess engine and used it on my Mirage moving chess piece robot design. But we wanted a talking product too.
So I worked on my own compression algorithm. I had done my Master’s Thesis in grad school on a computer voice recognition technique, so I enjoyed getting back into computer voice “research”. So now I had full control, from the studio recording, to the compression and decompression of the voice by computer.
The first product I used my system on was Ivan The Terrible. I also added sound effects to the product, giving it yet another dimension of entertainment. This was done using the H8.
When I switched over to the Sunplus/GeneralPlus 65c02 single chip BLOBs, the chips were even more efficient since they had some voice hardware built into the chip.
The Alexandra The Great product was one of my interesting Talking Chess Computers. Alexandra an up and coming young woman Chess Master, had a manager who called us to see if we could work together, thus promoting Alexandra to the world.
We did, and she went into a local sound studio with me and did all the recordings. The recordings were In English, and also in Russian. They were Russian and the manager had an import company in Russia, so he wanted a Russian version to import into Russia. As I recall we did ship into Russia but not large numbers, since payment in Rubles was problematic.
What was cool, was that I didn’t use any human voices or studio for the French & Spanish (can’t remember if I ever did German).
I used the latest Text To Speech (TTS) systems that were starting to appear online. I eventually used the English TTS voice later, to eliminate Alexandra’s voice when our relationship ended.