Posted on May 21, 2023
PokerSAM – The Talking Poker Opponent for the Atari 400/800/XL/XE
PokerSAM is a one-player poker game for the 8-bit Atari.
The player competes against a single-voiced opponent, Sam, in a two-player game of five-card stud poker. The game uses the Software Automatic Mouth, or S.A.M. speech synthesis program developed by Mark Barton and sold by Don’t Ask Software.
S.A.M. was released for the Atari eight-bit family, Apple II, and Commodore 64. Released in 1982, it was one of the first commercial all-software voice-synthesis programs.
Speech synthesizers in the eighties were expensive and usually required expensive hardware. However, the Atari version of S.A.M. made use of the Atari’s embedded POKEY audio chip. Speech playback on the Atari normally disabled interrupt requests and shut down the ANTIC chip during vocal output. While speech could be generated without blanking the screen, the resulting speech was of lower quality.
The Apple version used an included expansion card that contained an eight-bit digital to analog converter. The Commodore 64 version used the 64’s embedded SID audio chip’s four-bit volume digital to analog converter.
S.A.M. was later used as the basis for the original MacInTalk, as well as the Narrator device in AmigaOS on the Commodore Amiga.
While PokerSAM may sound prehistoric when compared to today’s speech synthesizer, the effect was quite impressive in the nineteen eighties. Speech synthesis has come a long way since the eighties. Believe it or not, this video’s narration was generated by a speech synthesizer called Speechelo.