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Speak & Spell CV Box Art Speak & Spell CV Cartridge

Speak & Spell CV

DiRoccoVision • 2026 • Homebrew • Educational

Speech Synthesis Module Required!! (Lundy Preferred EVE will also work on the ADAM)

Homebrew Handheld Recreation

A tribute to the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell, rebuilt from the ground up
for ColecoVision and ADAM.

All forty keys of the original panel are here, and all five activities behind
them. SPELL IT reads you a word and asks you to type it, with two attempts
before it supplies the answer. SAY IT shows you a word, waits while you try it
aloud, pronounces it, then makes you spell the same ten back. MYSTERY WORD is
electronic hangman drawn from the two hardest levels. SECRET CODE runs the
original's reciprocal substitution alphabet, where the same key press both
encodes and decodes. LETTER speaks whatever you press.

The vocabulary is 155 words across four difficulty levels, sourced from
published research into the Speak & Spell word lists rather than invented.
Every one was given its pronunciation by hand, allophone by allophone.

It is not a sampler. Speech is synthesised live on a real SP0256 through the
Lundy or EVE speech card, assembled from 64 speech sounds the way the hardware
was designed to work — which means the cartridge can attempt words that were
never programmed into it. Type anything on the idle screen, press ENTER, and
it will have a go.

On an ADAM you type on the real keyboard. On a ColecoVision you drive a cursor
around the key grid with the joystick and press fire. The cartridge works out
which machine it is running on, and which speech card is fitted, and adjusts
its greeting, its menus and its controls accordingly. No configuration, no
switches.

▶ Play in Browser Game Library
PlatformColecoVision & ADAM
CategoryHomebrew
GenreEducational
Based OnTi Speak & Spell
Release Year2026
Players1 Player
ROM Size32KB
MediaROM File
ControllerStandard Controller
PublisherDiRoccoVision
Speak & Spell CV Screenshot 1 Speak & Spell CV Screenshot 2 Speak & Spell CV Screenshot 3 Speak & Spell CV Screenshot 4 Speak & Spell CV Screenshot 5 Speak & Spell CV Screenshot 6 Speak & Spell CV Screenshot 7
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CARTRIDGE & LABEL

Speak & Spell CV Cartridge

BEHIND THE SCENES

The hard part was never the game.

Reading the ADAM's keyboard from a cartridge should be impossible. The
keyboard lives behind AdamNet, and reaching it means switching the ADAM's
memory map to expose the shared control block — which swaps the cartridge
itself out of memory mid-instruction. The solution is a small routine copied
into RAM at boot that survives the swap, written entirely in relative jumps
because absolute ones would land in a cartridge that is no longer there. It
took thirty revisions and a great deal of real hardware to get right.

Every word in the cartridge was pronounced by hand. English spelling does not
tell you how a word sounds, so all 155 were written out phoneme by phoneme
against the SP0256 allophone tables — and the ones that fought back, YACHT and
RHYTHM and QUOTIENT, fought back for a while.

The cartridge supports two entirely different speech cards, the Lundy and the
EVE SS-CC, which share a chip but nothing else. The EVE's interface was
recovered by disassembling its original 1988 SmartBASIC driver and reading the
port numbers straight out of the machine code.

And the readout is blue, not green, because the original display was a vacuum
fluorescent tube rather than an LED matrix. Someone will notice.

CREDITS

DeveloperDiRoccoVision
DiRoccoVision
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