[Blindapple] Emulating Echo

[Tony Baechler]

Hi.  Yes, you are probably right, but it is far easier to hack slot 1 than 
slot 4.  A2 already opens a2.printlog for slot 1.  It would be easy to 
change this to com1 or ttyS0.   There is nothing pointing to slot 4 at all 
and no way to get it there without more programming which I don't know how 
to do.  If I can get it to work in slot 1, I'll look at slot 4.  Since it 
is very easy to get most programs to use a printer, I think slot 1 is the 
easiest for now.

Microtalk no longer exists, so I think Larry is out of the question.  My 
understanding is that Jayson wrote to Rob but got no reply.  I think we're 
on our own.  The best bet is to eithre try to disassemble things or look at 
various newsletters such as Raised Dot Computing.  I know nothing about 
assembly programming so I don't know how to set the flag to show that an 
Echo is really there.  That is something that someone else would have to 
do.  Maybe brun something to set the flag, brun textalker, route everything 
from slot 4 or slot 1 to com1, and we would have a reasonably good 
simulation of an Echo.  It would be nice to use review mode etc from within 
Textalker and to eliminate the need for an extra DOS screen reader.

At 10:47 AM 7/28/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>It checks a memory location for a return flag set from the speech chip.  I 
>used
>to have that info but I'm not sure that I still have it.  Rob at APH or 
>Larry at
>Microtalk ought to be able to get it for you.  In fact, either of them 
>probably
>know it without looking it up.
>
>Slot #1 use is going to be a potential problem since the Apple used it for a
>printer slot.  I suspect you'd be better off using #4 since a program isn't
>likely to check the slot flag on #4 and become upset about it but slot #1 is
>pretty likely to be checked by anything but BASIC programs.