Hello folks. I thought some of you might be interested in a project which
I have been on the verge of working on for some time, but which I have just
recently made any progress on. The project is to write a Unix based driver
for the Dectalk PC speech synthesizer. These are the full length isa cards
that slip into PCs and use the DOS based TSR to operate.
Thanks to DEC's generosity with machine readable documentation on how the
card works, I'm happy to report that I have an alpha version of a driver
working. I can cat files to it, send commands to alter the speech, load
dictionaries, etc. I cannot, at the moment, read status registers from the
card, and I'm not sure how complex applications that want fine grain
control over the synthesizer will work. I'm hoping T V Raman's Emacspeak
program will just work with this card, "out of the box".
Right now, the driver only works under NetBSD 1.0. When I get additional
functionality, however, I'll start working on porting it to FreeBSD, and
probably Solaris X86. I could also port to Linux, but I'm not sure how
straight forward this would be.
When the driver is more mature, I will probably make it freely
available to those who want it, but I need to discuss the legal issues with
a few folks first.
If anyone on this list has a Dectalk PC and a pc they'd like to run
Unix on with speech being directly controled by the Unix box, let me know.
I'd like to get some testers in the next months, and anyone whose
interested in playing with this, let me know.
-Brian
P.S. Please excuse the somewhat disjointed nature of this communque. It's
very late, and my brain is a little frazzled. But, I thought I'd share the
excitement anyway.
-Brian
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