[Blindapple] source for echo II

[Josh K]

i wonder if the same could or something similar done for keynote gold?

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On 1/29/2016 11:49 AM, Jayson Smith wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The problem is that the Echo card itself has absolutely no ability to 
> generate speech from text. All the Echo really is, when it comes right 
> down to it, is a chip that turns a certain type of LPC data into 
> sound. That's all it is.
>
> The Textalker software running on the Apple, and using the Apple's 
> processor, memory, etc. turns text into phonemes, then turns those 
> phonemes into the proper control signals and timings to send to the 
> Echo card to generate the right sounds. So when you hear Echo speech, 
> all but the last step, that of actually generating the sound you hear, 
> was done in software running on the Apple.
>
> If the Textalker source code still exists anywhere, I don't know it, 
> and wouldn't know who to ask. Even if it did, it would almost 
> certainly be written in 6502 assembly, the 6502 and its variants being 
> the microprocessor used by Apple II computers. There was a version of 
> the Echo for PC, but again, the Textalker software would probably have 
> been written in 8086 assembly.
>
> The bottom line is that emulating the hardware would probably not be a 
> problem, but that wouldn't get you much. Textalker would probably have 
> to be completely rewritten from scratch in order for it to work on 
> anything modern.
>
> A possibly more attractive idea would be to have a really stripped 
> down Apple emulator which did emulate the Echo card, and create a 
> custom disk for it which could interface with NVDA running on the PC 
> in order to have the Echo act as a speech synthesizer plugin for NVDA.
>
> Jayson
>
> On 1/27/2016 1:16 AM, Guillem León wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Yes, MESS itself is completely open-source. The problem is that the 
>> Echo II card is being directly emulated. So if you wanted to use it 
>> in external applications you would have to find a way to get that 
>> emulation working for all the parts of the card (the TMS5220, the 
>> text-to-speech part, the audio output) and I'm not sure how that 
>> would work.
>>
>>> On 27 Jan 2016, at 05:06, Jason Custer <jscuster at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> Really enjoying the apple emulator, takes me back. Just curious, is 
>>> the code for the echo II open source? Just curious.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Jason
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>>
>
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