[Blindapple] introduction

[Tony Baechler]

Hi.  As far as I know, I still have it.  I think I actually have a couple 
different versions of it.  Getting it out of storage and into a disk image 
form is a different matter though.  I was going to get an IIgs but I've 
given up on that.  Besides I have nowhere to put it and I don't know the 
first thing about imaging.  Also to be honest I don't really have enough of 
an interest now to make it worth my while.  I still like and collect Apple 
stuff, but I've pretty much resigned myself to leaving my Apple stuff in 
storage permanently, at least until I find lots of room to set up another 
computer.  I don't have the luxury of a basement or other spare rooms, and 
I have three or four computers set up already.

Now, about emulating the Echo card.  This might be easier than you would 
think.  Actually emulating the Echo sound would probably be 
impossible.  You might as well forget about hearing an Echo voice come out 
of your emulated Apple.  However, there might still be a way.  I know of at 
least two emulators with source available.  Actually three, but one never 
got completed.  I am only talking about emulators which are 
accessible.  One is called A2 and is written in C.  The other is Applemu 
and is written in assembly so it would be hard to port to anything but 
DOS.  The third is Appleemu and is also in C and assembler but was never 
finished.  Probably the easiest one to hack would be A2.  It runs best on 
Linux but can be made to run under DOS.  Somehow it would need to be 
programmed to set up a dummy card in slot 4 or somewhere that the Echo 
goes.  That way you could run Textalker and it wouldn't crash.  Also 
somehow that slot would have to route everything to a port, such as a 
serial port.  What you could then do is plug in something like the DEC-Talk 
Express into a serial port, run the emulator, brun textalker, and you would 
have approximately the same thing as an Echo emulator.

Now, if you know anything about speech, you will see one obvious 
problem.  That is that the codes for the Litetalk, DEC-Talk etc are 
completely different than the Echo.  Actually in that regard the Litetalk 
would be the easiest to work with because the codes are very similar.  My 
solution to that would be to write a new, specialized Textalker or maybe 
look at Scat for the Doubletalk.  Someone would have to change all the 
codes to match the other synthesizer.  Another option would be to do that 
within the program itself.  In other words, when Control E, C is sent to 
slot 4, increase the speech rate to 300 words per minute or something by 
sending the [: code.  That would be a lot of extra programming though, but 
Textalker is simple enough that it would not be impossible.

Finally, there is yet another idea which might work but I haven't tested 
it.  I have an alternative screen reader for the Apple.  It is not 
Textalker but is similar.  It's supposed to be compatible.  I think, but 
I'm not sure, that I have source.  In that case, it's just a matter of 
compiling that screen reader and using it in place of Textalker.  Routing 
the slot to the serial port is easy, Applemu will do it already.  A2 
supports dumping anything sent to a printer to a log file, so something 
similar could be done to send slot 4 to Com1 or ttyS0.  Jayson also has 
this screen reader but it isn't otherwise in general distribution.  Even if 
it doesn't have source, I think it supports other synths easily 
enough.  Any thoughts?  Any programmers on this list?

At 05:13 AM 7/26/2005 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi,
>Sounds like Space Invaders to me.  Once again, I don't have this disk, but 
>someone I talked to once had it.  Don't know if anybody here on this list 
>still has it, but if so, we'd love to have it!
>I do wish that an emulator did support the Echo synthesizer.  It'd have to 
>be a Windows or Linux-based emulator, but if it were to emulate an Echo 
>card, that would give us the accessibility to Apple stuff we want through 
>the traditional Textalker software.
>Jayson.