#Speech problems
Chip –
The short answer is Yes, that's what you need to do. The narrator.device
uses the 68000 to generate the waveforms needed by the audio.device to generate
the audio. If anything is causing the narrator.device to be starved for CPU
time, then the speech will sound _WEIRD_ when you try to listen to something.
There are two big eaters of CPU cycles in the Amiga system. One is the
Blitter, which is allowed to steal cycles from the 68000 (video operations more
time critical than CPU operations). The other is video DMA; overscan and lots
of blitplanes can cause the video hardware to steal from both the blitter and
the CPU.
In general, you can't do anything about the blitter stealing. For the video:
In lo-res – 1 to 4 planes cause no stealing; 5 planes cause 25% cycle stealing;
and 6 planes cause 50% stealing. In hi-res – 1 or 2 planes (WorkBench screen)
cause no stealing; 3 planes (the Whap! screen, I think) cause 50% stealing; 4
planes cause 100% stealing. You can't have more than 4 planes in hi-res
because there are no more cycles to steal.