“The algorithms” get a lot of crap these days, but the YouTube video suggestion system dug out a nice oldschool video for me today: Animation 101, an Amiga tutorial by D. L. Richardson of Myriad Visual Adventures. How have I never seen this one? It’s great!
I love the humor, the effort that went into this, and the fact that the presenter (63 at the time, apparently) obviously had a lot of fun doing it. One hour of pure retro Amiga bliss!
The author also seems to be a real fan of the Amiga speech synthesis. In a recent blog post I briefly mentioned creating little spoken-word dramas in AmigaBasic as a kid. This gentleman does the same thing! (At 54:34 in the video.) He also says “I’m sure you’ve played with it many times”, and I can’t help but imagine him showing off the latest funny dialogue he’s written to his local Amiga user group. :)
PS: On a slightly related note: I have always been really eager to study the inner workings of the narrator device, the speech synthesis implementation by Joseph Katz and Mark Barton of SoftVoice. And not only me! Somehow I never bothered to check if it was contained in the Amiga OS source code leak, which it indeed was.
Of course™, I don’t have access to those leaked sources and I would never take a peek at it! But if I were to do such a thing, I might conclude that it’s an intricate piece of software with many moving parts! Maybe it even has over 10k lines of code, mostly hand-written 68000 assembly? No wonder it sounds so great. And it’s okay my own crappy speech synth attempts will always pale in comparison…
