Case study

Microsoft Sam: a portable C rebuild of the SAPI 5 engine

Rebuilds the Windows XP SAPI 5 engine spttseng.dll for Microsoft Sam, Mike, and Mary as C99 that reads the original voice files. The README reports audio of the same length with every sample within ±1 LSB of the 16-bit engine.

Targets: Binary
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-04

Stars: 16
Last commit: 2026-09-23
Language: C

GitHub data as of 2026-11-09

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Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: Needs a C99 compiler and your own Sam.spd, Mike.spd, or Mary.spd with the matching .sdf files, plus LTTS1033.LXA and r1033tts.LXA. The README says the voice data is not included.
Scope: Sam, Mike, and Mary share one engine. The README also describes SAPI 4 voice effects rebuilt as an audio effect, and says the SAPI 4 voices themselves are not ported. It says the small tables in src/sam_abbrev_tab.h, src/sam_pos_rules.h, and src/sam_words_tab.h were transcribed from the engine.
Testing evidence: The README says about 99.7% of samples match exactly and the rest differ by float rounding, and reports 21/21 corpus sentences, 104/104 number and date lines, 100/100 homograph sentences, and 180/180 paragraphs of Alice in Wonderland. tools/compare_corpus.py compares the C output with WAVs that the README says are not included.
License: The README says MIT for the code and points at LICENSE. That file is the MIT License, copyright 2026 KamiKitsune420. Microsoft voice data is not included.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{ms-sam-mike-mary-case,
  title = {{Microsoft Sam: a portable C rebuild of the SAPI 5 engine}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/KamiKitsune420/ms-sam-mike-mary-decomp}},
  url = {https://github.com/KamiKitsune420/ms-sam-mike-mary-decomp},
  urldate = {2026-11-04},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/ms-sam-mike-mary-case/}}
}

Plain text

Microsoft Sam: a portable C rebuild of the SAPI 5 engine. https://github.com/KamiKitsune420/ms-sam-mike-mary-decomp (accessed 2026-11-04). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/ms-sam-mike-mary-case/

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Primary sources

README.md GitHub · KamiKitsune420/ms-sam-mike-mary-decomp · Revision cf1122c
tools/compare_corpus.py GitHub · KamiKitsune420/ms-sam-mike-mary-decomp · Revision cf1122c
LICENSE GitHub · KamiKitsune420/ms-sam-mike-mary-decomp · Revision cf1122c