Talking PipBoy?

[alec]

I was googling some stuff and found this rather interesting site dealing with isometric games. It also has a page covering Fallout, on which this little tidbit caught my attention:

One of the fun things I added to the Mac version that wasn't in the PC version was having the Pipboy talk. I used the Mac's Text to Speech capability. When the Pipboy came up, it would say hello. It would have different greetings on various holidays. I'm not sure if many people noticed it. When the game was ported to OS X, they dropped that. I don't know why.—Tim Hume

The page is located here.

I didn't even know there was a Mac version. Any chance someone could find those sound files? Mayhaps it would be fun to mod them into the pc version?

 

[verwandlung]

That would be very nice .

 

[TheRatKing]

I had the old mac version of Fallout, but alas, the cd broke before my older brother could pass it on to me. I spent many days trying to clean the cd before realizing that the effort was futile. I'm sure he remembers the pipboy voice though...

 

[Kanhef]

The Mac OS has a built-in speech synthesis feature, which converts text into something resembling human speech. There are several voice profiles that can be selected, some of which are rather robotic-sounding. Stephen Hawking (many clips on youtube) uses one of them.

So there are no actual sound files, just text that is passed to the OS's synthesizer. It might be possible capture the sound output using one of the better voices. Classes start this week so I'm going to be busy, but I'll see if I can do it if no one else can.

The OS X versions of Fallout 1 and 2 were made by The Omni Group, which ported them from the Windows versions. They did such a good job that they have all the same bugs. Since they didn't build from the earlier Mac code, out went all the Mac-specific features. The original version was made for OS 7.5, so it would have had to be completely rewritten anyway, so porting from Windows was the easiest option.