Speak & Spell

A tribute to the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell, rebuilt from the ground up
for ColecoVision and ADAM.

All forty keys of the original panel are here, and all five activities behind
them. SPELL IT reads you a word and asks you to type it, with two attempts
before it supplies the answer. SAY IT shows you a word, waits while you try it
aloud, pronounces it, then makes you spell the same ten back. MYSTERY WORD is
electronic hangman drawn from the two hardest levels. SECRET CODE runs the
original's reciprocal substitution alphabet, where the same key press both
encodes and decodes. LETTER speaks whatever you press.

The vocabulary is 155 words across four difficulty levels, sourced from
published research into the Speak & Spell word lists rather than invented.
Every one was given its pronunciation by hand, allophone by allophone.

It is not a sampler. Speech is synthesised live on a real SP0256 through the
Lundy or EVE speech card, assembled from 64 speech sounds the way the hardware
was designed to work — which means the cartridge can attempt words that were
never programmed into it. Type anything on the idle screen, press ENTER, and
it will have a go.

On an ADAM you type on the real keyboard. On a ColecoVision you drive a cursor
around the key grid with the joystick and press fire. The cartridge works out
which machine it is running on, and which speech card is fitted, and adjusts
its greeting, its menus and its controls accordingly. No configuration, no
switches.