ULTRASOUND BY SIREN SOFTWARE. INSTRUCTIONS 22/10/87 PROGRAM WRITTEN BY ESAT SOFTWARE. (c) ESAT SOFTWARE ENGLISH VERSION FROM SIREN SOFTWARE. Before running this program, please note that some peripherals/add-ons may cause malfunctions in this program. Please remove all add-ons except printers, joysticks, disc drives and tape recorders. Ultrasound is a collection of 4 powerful utilities that allow you to produce various sound effects, tunes, digitised noise and speech from your Amstrad CPC 464/664/6128 computer. To run the program, place the Ultrasound disc in drive A and type ... RUN "SIREN" [enter]. Ultrasound will then load up. When loaded, you will be presented with a menu of 4 options: 1. Ultrasound The sound digitiser. 2. Magicsound The software speech program. (called Soft-talk) 3. Synthesoft The mini synthesisor program. 4. Soundsoft The sound effects generator. To select the program of your choice, please press the relevant key (1-4) on your keyboard. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UltraSound. This program allows you to digitise, replay and edit a sound. The source must come from the Datacorder on a CPC464 or an external tape recorder on a CPC6128/CPC664 To start digitising a sound, place a tape in the recorder and set the volume to about 3/4 full volume (or slightly higher). and press R on the keyboard. The cassette relay will click on allowing you to position the tape to the correct place. Once positioned, press the spacebar and then the PLAY key on the recorder. The sound will be read and digitised into memory. Upto about 1 minute of sound can be digitised into 37K of memory. When the digitising is complete, a graphical representation of the sound will be displayed on your screen. You can playback your sound by pressing the P key. The volume and speed of the playback can be altered. The start and end of the recording/playback can be enabling only certain parts of the sound to be recorded and played back. Use the Z&X keys to move the start cursor and the /&ç keys to move the end cursor. (The cursors appear under the graphic display.) The area between the cursor can be erased, moved to another area or saved to disc. FOR BEST RESULTS the recording should be made using high quality equipment. Please ensure that the heads are clean on your tape recorder and that you use a high quality cassette. If you are using a 664/6128, please expriment with the volume on the cassette unit to achieve optimum results. USING THE SOUND IN YOUR OWN PROGRAMS. Firstly, you must have a file on disc that has been created with Ultrasound and also the Ultrasound machine code routines which can copied from the Ultrasound disc as follows. Put the Ultrasound disc in drive A Type LOAD "ROUTVOC,42000 Put another disc in the drive Type SAVE "ROUTVOC",B,42000,127 Both this file and the sound file must both be present in memory. To replay the sound in your own program use: CALL 42000,D,L Where D is the start address of the sound file and L is the length. The volume can be altered by POKEing a value between 1 adn 15 into address &A462. The speed can be altered by POKEing a value between 1 and 39 into address &a430. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MAGICSOUND (SOFT-TALK) To load this program select option 2 from the main menu. When Soft-talk has loaded, you will be presented with a screen full of option boxes. Use the left/right cursor keys to move the cursor to the correct box and press the copy key to select the option. Most of them are straight forward. SAY Will speak one of the entered phrases SPEED Select at what speed you want the speech spoken at CENTRE Automatically adds spaces before and after the phrase MESSAGE Allows entry of messages MODIFY Allows messages to be altered using the standard Amstrad screen editor. LOAD Load a file from disc SAVE Save a file to disc PRINTER Print phrases onto a printer QUIT Return to main menu. Although Soft-talk will try and interpret your phrases, please help it along by using "F" instead of "PH" (ie "phrases" would be entered as "frases"), "U" instead of "OO" ("wood" = "wud") etc. USING SOFT-TALK IN YOUR OWN PROGRAMS. The Soft-Talk routines must be present in your own programs. These can be copied onto your own disc by typing in the following:- MEMORY &8000:LOAD "MAGIC.BIN" Then to save it:- SAVE "MAGIC.BIN",B,&8690,&206E When loaded into your own programs, use:- CALL &98A3 This will give you 3 new RSX commands:- ùsay,àa$ Speak the text in A$ ùcentre As per Magicsound. ùspeed,n Where n represents the speed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SYNTHESOFT This program turns your keyboard into an electronic synthesisor. The folowing keys perform the following:- LEFT/RIGHT Vibrato UP/DOWN Octave -/^ Noise 1-9 (numeric pad) Sustain 1-9 (main keybrd) Tone -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOUNDSOFT This program allows you to create all sorts of weird and wonderful sound effects. Included on the disc is an example file. It is best to load this file and experiment with it to understand how the program works. To load the file, move the cursor (with the cursor keys) onto the LOAD box and press the COPY key. When loaded, move the cursor onto the OPTIONS box and press the copy key. You will be given a menu of 4 options. First of all LIST the sounds and then select one by pressing N (name of sound) and then typing in a sounds name (i.e. train). The sound will start up and its details will be displayed on the screen. Select Quit to return to the main features of the program. To return to the file selection, simply use the OPTIONS box. Any of the sounds parameters can be adjusted by moving the cursor onto the required box, press the copy key and type in the new value followed by ENTER. The sound chip in the Amstrad contains 3 channels allowing upto three sounds being generated at any one go. PITCH The tone of the sound NOISE The amount of background noise (if any) MIX Mix tone and noise VOLUME Simply Volume Each of the above can be altered for each channel. PER ENV The Period Envelope. How long each complete noise cycle takes. MOD ENV A Modulation Envelope as described in the on screen manual. The above two will only work when the volume is on 16. By altering any of the above parameters, you can create virtually any sound effect.