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Speak and Spell - New vs. Old

🕑 Added 2021-12-09 00:57:43 +0000 UTC

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somewhere in 2010s I made an Acer Aspire One (little netbook) booting with Sugar on a Stick (linux for kids to run on OLPC). It had a speaking application, and my 3 or 4 years old daughter was quite excited to play with it.

Good estimate on the modern price. What I found online says it had an MSRP of $50 when released on Oct 5, 1978, which is $206.10 "today" (or as close as the US BLS CPI calculator can come).

Now I must buy one to hack, if I can just chisel off that epoxy blob.

That is an excellent question and one that didn't even occur to me. A quick bit of research shows it is made by a company named "Basic Fun". https://www.basicfun.com/electronicgames/index.html includes S&S with other electronic games.

Yes but will it run Attack of the Petscii Robots?

Chad Armstrong

Is the new S&S still made by TI, or did some other company produce the new model?

The 8-Bit Guy

Agreed. I had Ghostbusters and Impossible Mission at the time as well. But I couldn't really control the speech and it was just the same recordings played over and over. So the Speak and Spell had a little bit more versatility. That is until I got SAM for my C64 and could make it say anything I wanted.

I think you are spot on. When my kid was born in the early 2000's my parents found my old speak and spell but he wasn't interested. We had multiple computers that did all sorts. While for me speaking was cool, very few items could do that. I still remember Ghost Busters and Impossible Mission on the C64 because of the speech.

Philip McAndrew

All content = good content 🇮🇪 short format works well...Octo-bits thanks David

Paul Jacobson

If the new one could swear... Then I'd be interested 😂

MrHammond

Thanks David, the short format is also cool. I'm wondering now if the Speak and Spell is something US only? Or maybe also in the UK? I cannot remember anything that was even close from my childhood (in the Netherlands), but I guess I would have thought something like that to be extremely cool at the time, yes. As wenn I figured out the narrator.device from the Amiga (but that was a couple of years later).

Jon Christensen

So little more than a money grab. How disappointing. They could of had a renewed hit if they tried to update it with modern screen, maybe some web features or more languages. A real missed opportunity.