As I said yesterday and in other posts, I purchased a Cricket for my Apple //c back in the eighties. I primarily bought it for the clock calendar feature, however it was also known for its music and speech synthesizer.
Mine died several years after I bought it, but I keep an eye on ebay for one like it. I’ve only seen one in the last few years, and that was too expensive for me.
I’ve looked for more information on it and other than a reference on Apple2History, there wasn’t much out there. I did however find a press release for it dated April 2, 1984 which tells about the Cricket and another product called the Alphabits Serial Interface.
The cricket was a small box that plugged into a serial port on the Apple //c, usually the modem port. It provided Speech synthesis using the TI 5220 chip. The Cricket also provided sound effects and music generation.
I remember spending hours playing with the speech synthesizer and writing silly programs to use it. I wish I had some of those diskettes, but unfortunately, they have been lost due to reuse and time. I do remember one set of programs I was working on to create a message for our answering machine, but I don’t think we ever used it.
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