Speak & Spell, Then & Now

recently i found an original 1978 model speaking spell in the original box at goodwill so of course i had to buy it twelve dollars um but then i also thought it might be cool to compare it to the modern speaking spell which they do still sell the innards should be night and day different so yeah in this video i just want to like yeah take each part and take a look inside let's start with the old one okay so this is yeah again it's the original model with like the chiclet keys in the early 80s they redesigned it with a membrane keyboard and the packaging is insanely complete they have all the instruction manuals which i guess we can look at and actually quite a few of these um word expansion cards i always tried to find those when i was a kid because i i did have a speaking spell as well but i never could but now i guess i can try all those fancy words that are on those cartridges so i did test this uh oh it looks like there's uh messages written in the screen see that's like the da vinci code actually i was gonna get some novus three this week so maybe i can pick it up if you notice the keys oh man they're pretty crappy actually let's see so how did this work and the expansion cards would go in there and it looks like there's two screws holding it in and then the rest of it will probably notch out or well you'll see oh geez oh man while that screw has been in there since i was two years old the screw head looks like it's filled with like decades of dirt there we go oh man so this was one of the first well not the first but there we go one of like the early electronic toys um you know there was like the calculator wars of the 1970s where everyone was trying to make cheap calculators and obviously ti was a big part of that okay so you got these plastic tabs here so you've gotta need a bigger boat so anyway there's all these things like electronic merlin and the professor calculator thing and you know speaking spell was one of those devices but of course it could speak and was popularized by the movie e.t starring drew barrymore and the guy from netflix's house on haunted hill oh no the haunting of hill house wait house on haunted hill was that that was that movie with vincent price there we go hmm interesting oh it's interesting some of it's been reworked see the flux oh that's where the cartridges go oh my gosh oh that's that's pretty cheap okay what there's three wires going to the speaker i'm so confused you know i actually thought the circuit board would be bigger kinda like that line from roadhouse let's hold it in place looks like faith what is holding it in place oh my gosh look on the end the key matrix is hard wired in look at that can you see those wires what oh my gosh is that is that what's that's what's holding it oh it's over here too look at that look at that oh my gosh i've never seen anything like that that is wow i guess labor was cheaper back in the 70s thanks nixon oh and this one has an issue where the um the vfd is barely visible well oh man why did they do that did they do that was that cheaper than having some sort of ribbon cable connector i have been disenfranchised by the speaking spell spell disenfranchise d i s f that's uh wow that's i've never seen that before wow this beacon spell is taking me on a journey through worlds of wonder well this ear of solder is guaranteed to smell like tang when you heat it up oh yeah there it is tang it's what the astronauts drink that's weird some of this was wave solder but then this was well clearly soldered by hand it looks like this is going directly to the vfd i mean i assume it's a vfd i wonder if it's degassed or if there's something wrong with the driver chip i'm going to actually run the hako at one of the lower settings that was the lowest possible setting john luke it would be very easy um to ruin these traces because the copper is glued to the pcb so it's so old it would be pretty easy to cause it to lift up i mean i could fix it but i'd rather just not rip it up in the first place i wonder if e.t had a desoldering iron didn't he have like big chunky fingers like how did he really do this i guess i'm you know i'm being an ableist by making fun of et's ability to hack a speaking spell it's actually one of the earliest movies i've ever seen in the theater remember my sister was really scared of the government agents even though as we found out one of the government agents was a good guy that was back when the government agents still had guns instead of walkie-talkies you can spell any word as long as it's eight characters or less yeah so vfd is vacuum fluorescent display so they can degas and basically fail over time so unlike the texas instruments calculators everything in this is from texas instruments oh yeah i'm guessing poop guessing is going to be uh driver for the vfd um a cp of some kind the speech synthesis chip and then probably an eprom or i'm sorry a mask rom that stores the information oh no they costed out the flyback diodes for the power voltage input no oh look at the initials of some long dead people i'm not dead yet yes you are now shut up something else i notice the circuit board is thinner than usual it's um oh gosh it's well what's well under a sixteenth of an inch which would have been the standard at the time that's well look oh look at this look at that chip see how it wasn't pushed in fully you must have swapped it after the fact i don't know if you can see it on camera how it's kind of cattywampus as far as how flat it's pushed compared to that one i know i can make speak and spell portable everything is like snapped together you know in a lot of ways this is kind of for its time period 1978 a lot of the construction techniques are kind of cheap flashback to 1979. oh weird so i thought this was going to be column row but it's actually two separate keypads what no way oh oh so yeah this is a a tactile dome keypad um okay i don't want to ruin it too much but yeah it's going to be just like a modern tack switch where there's a a metal dome and it basically depresses and completes a circuit xbox one controller the modern marvel of this age same basic thing see tactile dome oh oh what is it so it's five by four so five by four yeah so this is just that's weird it's two separate two separate matrixes you know this is probably some off-the-shelf like industrial keypad controller and then this rotated it sideways uh yeah so i'll clean up the keys and whatnot later on this may have actually been laid out by hand when they did have a computer would you think texas instruments would have computer assisted layout tools in 1978. yeah i didn't even clean up the flux i mean it's not like you really you don't have to again this is this thing is probably sub one megahertz speed oh well i'll clean it up and let's see so we're basically looking at two separate keyboard matrixes or matrixes wow wow those take a long trip hmm oh you know what else this might be doing this might be acting as a voltage amplifier to run the vfd that's also probably why it's its own separate little board geez even the vfd isn't putting straight look at that come on texas instruments i thought texas was the greatest state ever i was actually in texas just last week i went to taste of texas which is an amazing steak house it's on the north side of houston if you're ever in the north side of houston i would definitely recommend you check check out taste of texas it's kind of funny so of course i just you know i went there during these unprecedented times they had the seats spaced out and so some of the some of the chairs were empty they had made cardboard cut outs of famous texans and sat them down in the seats uh okay 28 1 l is the speech okay so that's the speech synthesizer right there okay you know it's kind of interesting um oh look at that they bodged that wait no was that through hole or something like that ah that is look at that that is a weird design um a version of the speech synthesizer was actually used on some of the atari games uh the arcade machines like road blasters and attack from the robot monsters an evolved version of this but still the same thing that's why those games had kind of sketchy speech you know like robot monsters was like in this oscar right um because it wasn't it wasn't actually you know pcm audio this one see one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 12 13 14. so 28 dip also right next to the expansion so i'm gonna guess this is the rom the two vsms on the main via what's a vsm voice synthesis module voice synthesis memory okay oh okay all right yeah so okay i think i figured it out so yes um the reason they have a slightly different part number is because these are mask roms um they basically it's you know it's not like an eeprom or a eprom you know one e or two e's it's not programmable you basically make a mask rom once and then that's it so these are the two part numbers 51 and 52 which form the pair for the total amount of memory and well let's see what it says um 16k okay so um that's 32k of speech rom which means the only thing that's left is this being the microcontroller and so that means well that's interesting because these would have to be on a bus wouldn't they yeah yeah there's the bus well here let's um when was a 78 all right oh man this could be a losing battle that flux has been on there since since women could wear pants in iran see when you're super smart like me you don't need an army of writers to come up with jokes for you you just think what happened in 1978 i can't remember when we talked about it but this is also the what was it oh yeah was that nintendo m82 um this is the kind of solder mask we have to be really careful because it is not hard at all to destroy the mask and make it um you know make it something that can be short-circuited self-aggrandize much ben spell self aggrandize s e l f oh crap there's no hyphen on the keyboard well i cleaned up the old flux i'm gonna re-ball these and then i'll clean up the new flux um yeah and then we can maybe try to figure out what's wrong with the screen i mean if it's degas there's nothing i can really do of course it's probably matrix maybe i could rip the display out of that new speaking spell that i bought and put it into this one you know we can put a man on the moon but we can't make an sd card that you can actually get ink to stick to i mean seriously i mean it seems like they put a space there to write things on but the ink never sticks it's like they're designed to repel ink like why don't we put that same material on like the side of building so they can't be vandalized but no we put it someplace where we're trying to write down information oh i also read that these roms output their data serially which makes sense because otherwise this uh dip 40 microcontroller would run out of i o really fast i had to double check the wiring but yeah this is where the battery attached and this side goes to a really beefy trace which i believe is ground but the other one is really wimpy and that's the positive voltage notice over here there's also another uh trace which was probably for an external power adapter that they never included at least now with this model i don't think i'm gonna use my bench power supply and give this thing what would that be six volts and see what happens this is actually starting to look like that scene from e.t all right only one well you probably can't even see it well there let me try turning off these lights you can me yeah yeah you can see it it should say spell a but it looks like most of it's degassed that's too bad i don't know if i could even fix that well the thing is if it was degassed wouldn't it affect all the letters yeah because they're not individual gas chambers because there's only one it's called a nipple there's only one nipple ah could it be something else maybe like a power supply issue there's a potentiometer what if that affects just the volume let's see if i can [Music] make it shine wherever you go let's adjust this part i bet that's volume oh it's speed you know what i didn't see a crystal on this so this probably uses like a cheapy residence oscillator court i mean this whole thing is cheaper than i would have expected well you know what it probably was you know to give them credit um it was probably actually kind of expensive technology for a toy so they had to cut corners wherever they could i'm i'm thinking this over here is probably a uh like i said before probably a amplifier for the speech and then also probably a voltage uh inverter to put because these things run off a very high voltage they don't just run off you know five volts like everything else oh shoot i wonder if it can be fixed because i get well here let's just yeah you can kind of i'm going to look at the camera lens what are you doing here q yeah so it's why okay i'm going to be brighter on one side than the other oh yeah ben just just just squish it but it's just one thing of gas and someone would probably correct me below i wonder what would cause that hmm i want to come back and try to fix this up but i think i might want to take a break and actually look inside the other modern speaking spell try me press go spell the voice is completely different original speech synthesizer technology wrong sounds just like you remember wrong includes batteries yes in the middle of a young boy's speak and spell instructions the instructions are spell things correctly how is that spelled correctly i figured out the mystery of the sphinx oh this is the demo tag well it weighs bugger all what a surprise um oh man the keys have no tactile feel whatsoever spell level a press go to begin this is not anything like what it sounded like also the screen's actually pretty dark does it even have the same words i wonder spell level a press go to begin level b press go to begin spell laughter okay yeah i remember l a u g h e e r you are correct see what's in this thing i'm going to predict um a glop top audio amplifier and then uh probably like a soic eight quad flash eeprom it's probably gonna be the same stuff you see in every one of these modern cheapy tv games oh there's gonna be nothing in this are you ready oh my gosh it's like less than nothing there it is called it glop top memory oh my gosh so you know they have like kind of like the rule of three for what things cost it's like take the retail price divided by three that's probably what it costs toys like this it's um it's much much lower than that this is gosh this is probably like three dollars if i had to guess oh this would be a great thumbnail right it's like electronics then and now right yeah this is just going to be the hold down for the matrix so unlike the other one we looked at this is just going to be uh you know column row matrix and then uh silk screen conductive ink printing see the carbon contacts right there so this is probably just a sticker um with um basically you know two layers of conductive ink plastic and then when you push the button it makes contact that's the same way most modern keyboards work although there's no flex to it whatsoever which is actually pretty normal because normally with a keyboard you know you're pushing a key and then it contacts something like this but with this one they're like oh who cares if it's tactile it's for kids it's it's cheap what does this thing cost me 24. i wonder what this thing cost originally but it was like 80. so 80 in 1978 would have been like well let's see that was before the 80s i'll look it up maybe i'll put it on the screen gonna have the led on the other side huh oh interesting okay i didn't expect that um it's actually got see that piece of rubber there that is a conductor which is well here let's pull it out that's kind of unusual oh shoot be careful [Music] oh man gotta be careful that i don't delaminate that oh this is so cheap oh this is now what even lines that up okay there we go so that little wafer sandwich thing that's actually conductive and it's transferring oh this is oh yeah whatever that that's probably just meant as an insulator huh it's weird like i'm not even sure it it might actually be oled i'm not sure why it's probably not that fancy if you can see it in the light yeah see at the top you can actually see the conductors where it's going into the screen so yeah this isn't even soldered in place it's just press fit for the connection oh yeah right there a little transistor that's probably being used to amplify wait this has batteries right actually that's might be a voltage regulator it's actually a pretty big glop top that's not normal look they actually spent a lot of money on this try me switch so that piece of plastic came out of this basically once you pull the plastic out of this it switches it into normal mode instead of demo mode so that's one of the only through-hole parts so ironically yes the thing that takes it out of demo mode is one of the most expensive things on the board but yeah look how tiny that is so how this is gonna work like most of these toys is um your program and your data is on this quad spy flash and then the microcontroller unit in here loads this program off of that on boot and then executes oh oh this is interesting that is an lcd screen and these these are leds backlighting it that's probably why it's so dim it's rather dim you know we could probably boost that by by uh reducing the resistor value see see the well sorry it's probably not on camera properly see how there's um resistors next to each led wait that's not no that wouldn't be a zero ohm well let's just see what it is those are zero ohm resistors but oh they're probably just using it to like jump a connection maybe they yeah maybe they specked it with um you know a current limiting resistor and then it was too dim and so they changed all the resistor values to zero and it's still pretty dim [Laughter] oh my what a fail does it still work spell level a and press go to begin those leds are so dark yeah so they're simulating an led segmented display by shining leds through an lcd display oh good god i mean if you didn't know any better you probably wouldn't think this was a big deal but original voice synthesis technology come on it's like they spent all of their money on the mold and you know the size you know the size of a toy actually affects this profitability too like how many of them you can fit on the shelf ah you know like i mean think about it like i guess this is like for gen xers to get for their nieces and kids and grandchildren it's like oh i remember this even though there's no reason for it to be this big the package says retro 80s but nothing like nothing in the 80s look like this this is i mean look at the colors for crying out loud yellow i mean the 70s is all about yellow gross oh you can change the volume be nice if it said volume 1 volume 2 volume 3. so that other speaking spell had an excuse to have a really dark screen because it was really old this is pretty bad the viewing angle goes bad after about 10 degrees in person actually the camera makes it look better than it actually is oh for 25 bucks i mean really you're buying the 25 bucks is buying the shell the electronics are bugger all well there you have it the differences between an original 1978 speaking spell and the new 2019 model you can still buy in stores a lot has changed in 42 years so i haven't put this one back together yet because i'm gonna see if i can figure out how to replace this screen i'll probably do that in a future episode i guess we'll see you then

Channel: Ben Heck Hacks

Views: 75,668

Keywords: speak & spell, et, glop top, cheap, quad spi, target, goodwill

Id: fxw60hdaHYo

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020