[Blindapple] Eamon Newsletters

Sat Nov 11 11:25:35 EST 2017

Hey Tony.

Thanks for the explanatory message. The short answer is that yes, I thought of running a virtual machine just to play Eamon games, but I’ve never created one before and yes, it does seem like a bit to go through just to get these games running. I have to spend most of my spare time these days looking for work, so haven’t really been tinkering much. *grins*

The Talking dosbox solution does seem like it’d be best. When I claimed that Eamon Deluxe didn’t work with screen-readers, I only meant that Windows 10 would not run Qbasic except under dosbox and I read a lot that kind of made me doubt it would even be worthwhile trying to get an old version of JAWS for Dos (if such a thing is still readily available) to work. Something about output to the soundcard. Anyway, I do not have a hardware synth, indeed; this is the only time I’ve considered that it might be an advantage now to have one!

I know Frank did care about the software’s accessibility; back when I was using Eamon Deluxe on my XP machine I had a problem and I contacted him about it. He suggested a fix for me right away (changing a couple of lines of the qbasic code) and I was up and running for a good while.

I’ll definitely give your package a try and report back. Offlist is probably best. Cheers.

JM

From: BlindApple [mailto:blindapple-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of tony at baechler.net
Sent: November 11, 2017 8:15 AM
To: Blind Apple Discussions
Subject: Re: [Blindapple] Eamon Newsletters

You have two options. One is set up a Linux virtual machine and run dosemu. I can tell you that Eamon Deluxe works fine. The other is Talking DOSBox. I'm still on XP, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. Your statement that it doesn't work with screen readers is wrong. I know it does. The Linux option is the best in terms of accessibility, but Talking DOSBox is far easier to get up and working. My own personal preference is to play the DOS 3.3 games with the Apple emulator. There are some adventures unique to Eamon Deluxe which aren't on the Apple and probably will never be ported. It's too bad that Frank seems to have lost interest. I know he really tried to make them accessible, but they aren't, even in a real DOS environment. Creating a virtual machine wouldn't be too hard, but that's a huge effort to go through, not to mention the disk space, just for a few Eamon adventures. I suggested the Linux option years ago, but he didn't act upon it. I could probably do it myself, but other than for a few people here, I don't see why. If there is a lot of interest, I'll see what I can do. Frankly, I'd rather have someone else do it. Debian doesn't support dosemu anymore which means Ubuntu won't either, which further complicates things. Actually, a third option would be a standalone FreeDOS CD. I know FreeDOS should support most DOS screen readers, but not software speech. If you have a hardware synth, you just boot the CD and play Eamon all you want, but I know a lot of you don't, so that leaves most of you out. The other problem with Linux is the voice. The only free software synth is ESpeak which is not only nothing like the Echo but gets on most people's nerves. I guess that leaves Talking DOSBox. I could package Eamon Deluxe for it relatively easily. If you're interested, please do me a favor and test it on your system to see if it does in fact work with a screen reader. If it does, please write here or write me privately off list. If not, let me know what isn't working. I should warn you that no one seems to be working on it anymore, or if they are, I'm not aware of it and am not hosting it.

http://batsupport.com/unsupported/dosbox/

On 2017-11-10 10:26, JM Casey wrote:

Nice. Have yet to try playing these on the Apple emulator, but I was a fan back in the day, and also enjoyed for a brief time the Eamon Deluxe port for PC…alas that no longer works in Windows 10 except in a dosbox environment, which doesn’t work with screen-readers. The newsletters are a most interesting archive.

From: BlindApple [mailto:blindapple-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Weiss
Sent: November 9, 2017 6:46 PM
To: Blind Apple Discussions
Subject: [Blindapple] Eamon Newsletters

Attached is

EamonNewsletters.zip

These are regular textfiles that can be read with notepad or any other windows program that can read textfiles.

They came from

 <http://www.eamonag.org/> http://www.eamonag.org/

They are also on dropbox in the periodicals folder.

I renamed them so they would appear in order by year and month.

Jeff Weiss

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