[Blindapple] Emulating Echo

[Tony Baechler]

Hi.  I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the Cricket since I never had 
one.  The point here is to simulate an Echo, not emulate it.  Emulating it 
would be very difficult if not impossible.  I wouldn't even try.  If I can 
trick Textalker to pretend there is an Echo where there isn't, and route 
that to a hardware port like com1, it would be possible to simulate the 
Echo, including review mode.  Cricket would really make no 
difference.  Also remember that A2 has no port and no means of emulating 
them.  The only slot it emulates, other than slot 6 to boot is slot 1.  It 
doesn't even really emulate ProDOS.  It has a dummy ProDOS driver built-in 
but doesn't actually do anything with the system files on a ProDOS disk.  I 
found that out when I was looking at jump.c.  It doesn't emulate slot 
3.  If you do PR#3, it crashes.  We only have slot 1 to work with for now 
under A2.  If we can switch to something like an IIe or IIgs emulator, 
everything changes and we can consider a Cricket.  For now, I just think it 
would be nice to use A2 reliably without a separate DOS screen reader and 
still use some of the Textalker functionality.  I think my next experiment 
will be to find the old 1.3 Textalker and try to get it to look in slot 
1.  I hope I have that disk around here.

At 09:40 AM 7/29/2005 +1000, you wrote:
>Guys,
>Has anyone thought that it might be easier to emulate a cricket than an echo?
>That way you're dealing with a serial interface, rather than an unknown 
>quantity in how to talk to the synth itself.
>Then you'd just need code to strip out the control codes, and send the 
>resultant text to a text file, or something.