[Blindapple] Note on Eamon disks not talking

[Tony Baechler]

Hi all,

Yes, the Eamon disks talk just fine.  I've played through several with no
trouble at all.  Just remember to read the instructions carefully regarding
how to switch disks.  They will not boot though and thus will not come up
talking on their own, at least not the official ones from eamonag.org.
There might be a talking Eamon disk, but I didn't see it.  It wouldn't be
hard to create one though.  The reason is because DOS was removed.  Also,
modifying the boot program will not help because there is no DOS and they
won't run on their own without the master disk or a prebuilt character.  You
have a few options:

1. Boot any talking disk, save the state, exit the emulator and restart with
the master in drive one.  This is called D3_001.DSK.  You can then do the
following:

RUN THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF EAMON

Create a new character as normal, outfit it in the main hall and go on an
adventure.  That's what I do.  Note that Pronto-DOS won't work and games
will crash.  That's because there is no verify command, so you have to
either use regular DOS or another fast DOS with the verify command.

2. Boot a talking disk and insert the D3_UTL.DSK.  It has a utility called
Fresh Sam which creates an automatic character for you and lets you play on
any adventure.  Remember that you can't return to the Main Hall if you go
this route because it will trash your characters file.  The same rule
applies about requiring a different DOS.  None of the Eamon disks have a
standard hello program, so just copying Textalker won't work.  Also, many
Eamons are too big to allow Textalker and a saved game.  It's much better to
leave the official images alone except for a talking master.

This doesn't cover the few Eamons which are ProDOS only.  For those, you'll
need a ProDOS boot disk.  Some are standalone, meaning they don't need a
master to start, but most aren't.  That means you'll also need the ProDOS
master or utilities disk.  Note that I haven't had good luck getting the
ProDOS Eamons to work with Textalker.  Specifically, the version 8 DDD
definitely won't work and I don't think #240 will either.  That's because
they use eamon.utils which disconnects speech.

On 12/17/2013 6:42 AM, Kyle wrote:
> You may need to start with the talking Eamon disk. It should be in the
> set of images you have. If not, there is a small talking disk library
> that includes the talking Eamon disk available from the website where
> you found the emulator. Also, I believe many Eamon disks can be made to
> talk by adding textalker to them and modifying the HELLO program to run
> it. You can use FID from your talking DOS disk or your BEX disk to copy
> the two textalker files, as long as there is enough space for them on
> your Eamon disk. Then you can add a line like
> 
> 0 PRINT CHR$(4)"BRUN TEXTALKER.RAM"
> 
> to the HELLO program to make it start talking automatically. Hope this
> helps.
> ~Kyle
> http://kyle.tk/
>