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Digispeech DS201A

NeXT

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,141
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
I've had two of these hiding in a box here. They are triangular white boxes with a speaker and microphone grille on the front plus two quarter inch headphone jacks, a 3.5mm microphone jack and a volume knob. On the back you get a drum socket for power and either a 9 pin or 25 pin serial cable.

Some googling around gets me some vague information about it. It does not seem to be compatible with other more common sound systems but can either be made slightly more compatible with a TSR patch for IBM's speech system or apparently with the Digpak sound driver (whatever that is. Uhhh, paging Trixter?). Likewise there's no sign of any drivers anywhere and it seems someone here has asked for them here before. The only other thing I can pull up about it is that IBM LinkWay supports it (and by chance I have a copy of that).

Anyone else by chance have experience with the Digispeech?
 
(Trixter flies in, wearing a superhero cape) Did someone ask for ESOTERIC SOUND DEVICE ASSISTANCE?

"Digpak" is a series of sound drivers created by John Ratcliff. Digipak sits on int 66h and gives the programmer a standardized API for playing digitized audio from any DOS program, using any output device (including the PC speaker). Think of it as a commercial third-party "DirectSound" system for DOS. There were a few companies trying to do this, but Digpak was the most successful for the 16-bit real-mode DOS crowd. (There were others that were more successful for the 32-bit protected-mode crowd.)

John lent me the Digpak source, so I can peek at it to see what the Digispeech is capable of... Looks like Digpak requires an LWDIGI driver loaded before it can work:

Code: 
IF	DIG_DIGISP
hard	db	"LWDIGI must be loaded first, consult DIGISPEECH documentation",13,10,'$'
msg0	db	"Digispeech DS201 DIGPAK Driver"
ENDIF

So finding LWDIGI.EXE is going to be required for various games to support the unit. It also appears to downsample any audio sent to the digispeech to 8KHz, so don't expect hi fidelity.
 
Thank you both of you. I will now see if I can get some form of a squawk out of them.

It also appears to downsample any audio sent to the digispeech to 8KHz, so don't expect hi fidelity.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't expect anything less from a serial port sound system. ;)
 
Well, go through everything on the disk, because there's hints of CVSD, ADPCM, and LPC playback in the code, all of which are compression algorithms. If the DS201A really has some smarts built into it, you might be able to pump more quality out of that serial port.
 
I posted a video about my (partially successful) attempt to get the DS201A to work with a DOS game: https://youtu.be/phW38JIJOpM

Cloudschatze Do you also happen to have a copy of the Windows 3.1 driver for the DS201a? The Internet Archive preserved a snapshot of the Digispeech download site from the late '90s, which contains a link to a beta version of such a driver, among other downloads for both the Digispeech Plus and the DS201A. Unfortunately, the linked files themselves were not archived.

Here is a link to the archived Digispeech download page:

https://web.archive.org/web/19980626...s/filelib.html (drivers for the Plus are at the top, scroll all the way down for the DS201A downloads)

Many of the links were in the ZIP files that Cloudschatze already shared with us. But the file win201.zip is the one I'm looking for. Also, the file 201aman.pdf would be nice, since that's the DS201A manual in digital form, which would always be preferable to an optical scan of a paper manual. But I haven't been able to find these files anywhere else on-line. And some of the Plus drivers higher up on that page, such as the OS/2 driver, might be interesting to owners of those devices as well.

I'm hoping someone here (or perhaps on other retro forums) downloaded these files when they were still up and still have backups of them. But if not, there is a possibility that these files may have been lost forever. :(

I hope they can still be found somewhere though, since it would be fun to play with these things on Windows 3.1. :)
 
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