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Author Archives: nathan

Game Maker Text to Speech Extension – More Information

Recently I had an email from someone asking about the Game Maker Text to Speech DLL, apparently it will be used in some educational software in the U.K. Awesome I think! However I haven’t touched this since 2003. After some quick research there appears to be already some other extensions to Game Maker which allow this functionality, but some rely on nasty methods such as calling vb scripts. So with some inspiration I’ve created a package that will allow the DLL to run with Game Maker 8 using the “Extension” feature. To get it to work on my computer I just had to install the Microsoft SAPI 4 (The newest version is 5 though).

The extension, containing an example and (some partially updated) documentation can be downloaded here! Please provide some feedback if you can. :)

GMTTSExtension.zip (547kb for GM8)
Original DLL (180kb for GM5)

Bellow is ripped straight from the old readme.htm, the links should still work.

Note: If you have Windows Me or 2000 you should already have a speech engine installed. You can however add more engines if you want. Windows XP also has a speech engine, but it’s not compatible with the DLL, so you’ll need to download another engine. Windows XP users also need to install Microsoft SAPI 4 (825KB).

Microsoft Text-to-Speech Engines
Microsoft Engine 4.0 (7.3MB)

L&H TruVoice Text-to-Speech Engines
American English (0.99MB) voices
British English (2.54MB)
Dutch(2.58MB)
French(2.24MB)
German(2.18MB)
Italian(1.97MB)
Japanese(3.00MB)
Korean(3.03MB)
Portuguese(2.39MB)
Russian(2.85MB)
Spanish(2.36MB)

Hospital of Horrors – More Information

Hospital of Horrors was developed for a University final project. I did the programming and worked with Bettina Walsh, who created all the lovely art work! After 12 weeks of development, the game has reached a playable BETA stage. For now, development will be on hold to focus on another things, but doubtful it will be finished since we’ve both moved onto new things. We have some YouTube videos, check them out! If anyone would like to download the Desktop version, they can do so here. Please keep in mind it’s not a finished product and there are a few things which need improvement, but the basic mechanic of it is there. Remember, you have being warned!


If anyone was interested, the game was developed in Game Maker, since it’s great for sticking together a simple game, and also for prototyping ideas! If anyone is wanting to explore Game Design to create their own ideas, I’d highly recommend this program! It’s a great introduction to basic programming knowledge and design iteration.

From here I’m going to develop my skills further into ActionScript while learning PHP/MySQL so I can create Flash based games and have knowledge on how to build appropriate web sites suited to hold them. But really I don’t think it’d be long before I get into some serious stuff. ;o Anyone want to model some 3D for me? :3

Recycling the PSP

For around three years I had a PSP which was much loved. It played many kinds of music and movies on demand, and housed thousands of games. However as time went on and with the lack of care I had for the device, it eventually went ‘passed its used by’. The headphone jack ended up damaged and music became a chore to get a ‘clean’ sound, then the case started to crack in certain places. Inspired to repair it, I bought another case and replacement headphone jack, however, the case was really cheap and it just made things worse.

In a rage I bought another music player, and the PSP sat and collected dust for weeks. Scratching my head to think of what to do with it, I had the idea to turn it into a third computer monitor, you know, for log output stuff and things like that! Turns out it was more successful then I thought. It’s actually really simple to do this, but probably hasn’t been done with the bare minimum and treated solely as a permanent third screen.

PSP Screen

The PSP was totally stripped down to the motherboard, headphone/wireless/card board and the screen. Surprisingly it still all worked fine! Custom software was installed onto the device so it’d boot straight into the pspdisplay software on startup, and with some tricky software on the computer to talk to it through USB, I’m sure it will come in handy! There are some annoying things though, like pressing X when it starts up (not an issue though if it’s left on) and having a USB cable and power cable attached, but I hope to create one USB cable to feed it power and data at the sametime!. When or if I do that, I’ll write a little how to here.