32-bit voice modules made easy with VoiceGen32

Sound as a 32-bit compatible pound.

There are a number of ways to make RISC OS computer play sound samples – perhaps for sound effects in games – and one of these is to turn the sound sample into a voice module, an option often provided by software that works with audio samples. One such example was Armadeus, which came from Clares Micro Supplies – and is the software I used myself for the sound samples used in some of the budget games released by Soft Rock Software in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It is possible to make those games work on more modern machines – I was running some of them on the Raspberry Pi at last year’s London Show – but one of the things necessary to make them work was to disable the sound: The voice modules used in them, as created by Armadeus – and like the software itself – are not 32-bit compatible.

VoiceGen32 by Jon Scott presents one solution to this. Available from fellow RISC OS Open forum user David Saunders’ website (see note), the software will take 8-bit signed raw samples as a source, and from them create 32-bit compatible voice modules.

In a post on the forums, Jon notes that the resulting modules contain some 32-bit op-codes, which probably means they won’t work on Arm2-based computers, but expects them to work on any RISC OS computer “less than 20 years old” up to a Raspberry Pi – although the software itself, it seems, is only likely to work on machines running RISC OS 5.

In use, the software is very simple: It puts an icon on the right hand side of the icon bar, to which you drag an 8-bit signed raw sample (filetyped &FFD, or ‘Data’). This results in a Save dialogue appearing, and a drag of the icon therein to a suitable location results in the 32-bit compatible voice module being saved.

Please note hat if you are visiting David Saunders’ website to download the software using a Windows machine, some anti-virus software might give you a warning that the site is considered dangerous. This is probably a result of something else on CWahi.net, which is a free web hosting provider, but if you have any doubts, consider using your RISC OS computer to visit the site and download the software instead.

 

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