I was messing around with some PAL- and NTSC-based Commodore 64 stuff, and just happened to finally get a chance to test out a Commodore Magic Voice Speech Module with the Commodore cartridge conversion of Bally Midway’s arcade classic, Gorf. Both are fairly early Commodore products and definitely not the best that the Commodore 64 is capable of, but together they make for one of the better home Gorf ports. The speech really does add a lot to it.

The Magic Voice was supported by only a handful of cartridges, so it’s not really worth trying to acquire as anything more than a novelty. Nevertheless, it’s a fairly interesting add-on and can operate both on its own by issuing BASIC programming language speech commands or by inserting a compatible cartridge (like Gorf). You need to send the audio output from your Commodore 64 to the audio input of the Magic Voice, then the audio output of the Magic Voice to your display. Unfortunately, it’s purely a mono transaction on the Magic Voice side, but the sound quality is still good enough. My particular chain went from a Commodore 64 stereo S-VIDEO cable to both the Magic Voice and the XRGB-mini Framemeister, which went to my capture device and monitor. Enjoy the video and be sure to check out the photos that follow (note that for the video, but not the photos, I plugged the other audio channel into the Framemeister, so you should hear stereo (or at least two channels of audio)):