Well, not at all a vocoder, but it did sorta remind me of the way the Daleks sounded on Doctor Who.

During my years of isolation in deep East Texas in a tiny town with a population of 225, I had the only CoCo around. In fact, I may have had the only home computer that wasn’t at the school. I remember discovering (or maybe reading about this in Rainbow) how you could use the AUDIO command to create some weird effects as you played a tape through the cassette drive (I did not have a disk drive at this point).

Knowing what I now know about BASIC optimization, I present this bit of code:

0 AUDIOON:AUDIOOFF:GOTO

Stick a tape in the tape drive, press PLAY then type “MOTOR ON” to get the tape rolling, then RUN.

I learned I could open the tape door on my Sears (I think) cassette recorder and then hold down something inside and click REC-PLAY to put the tape player in RECORD mode. I could then speak into the microphone and it would send the output to the earphone jack into the CoCo, allowing me to use it like a microphone. I could turn up the volume and talk into the microphone and hear the distorted audio come out of my TV speaker.

Ever tried this?