Hi Dug
Sory I havent been able to reply sooner, I got burried under in email,
like a thousand messages. It takes me a while to go threw.
Yah the power failure is a problem, I would write the note and save it to
disk on a flopy, so I would have lots of notes to go threw. I didn't loose
any data this way, but am not sure what the power failure did to the system
files.
It always booted in to the wordprosessor so I don't think power outage
effected the software.
It took a few days of thinking to figure out how to repair the broken
pin on the CPU, since I couldn't solder something that small.
I didn't think it would work, and was trying to find a new CPU for it,
well, it worked so I was spaired that.
Also, I got a new piece of equiptment, it's a little box about five
inches square and about one and some inches thick. It has a cable whith a
DB 9 feemale conecter on the end of it.
It's a Double talk synthasiser, Thought I'de sneek that in on you. I have
been bissy whith configuring software on a notebook computer to make it
talk.
You can hear what it sounds like if you have a wave player, there are
some wave files and other info about the doubletalk at:
www.rcsys.com
The cool thing about the doubletalk is the text to speech conversion is
done by the doubletalk itself, so it doesn't use the computer's CPU to do
that.
Some of the text to speech software takes about 300K of conventional
memory, this is a painfully slow way to use synthasisers whith computers.
Another part of making the computer talk iss a screen reader program, this
is what I was configuring , or trying to configure.
What the screen reader does is it sends what is on the screen to the
synthasiser to be spoken. The screenreader also does more things, but that
is the basic thing it does.
If you want to experiment whith a screen reader and don't have a
synthasiser, I found one that uses the computer speaker to speek threw, I
like this one because it installs itself and is easy to use, it's called
seekline screen reader.
Seekline has some drawbacks mainly the conventional memory usage mentioned
abuv, another problem is seekline doesn't recognise non ascii characters on
the screen, I don't know what these are since I can't see them. This is a
newsence when you are in some setup programs, because when seekline sais
press nonascii to exit, it is unknown what key to press.
Aside from that seekline is a great little program.
If you wnat to try it out it lives at:
http://world.std.com/~speechfb
The downloadable Seekline screen reader is shareware, one file about a meg
or more called sl.exe
works in dos.
I have been trying to get people to try some of the screenreaders to get
some feed back on what they think, I am not doing a servay or any thing like
that, I am just curious about what people think.
So if you have some extra time let me know what you think., I just thought
of some thing, maybe you could install it on the Wang computer, it just
might talk threw the computer speeker.
I didn't know about seekline when I had the wang but if it worked in it I
would have kept the wang.
Befor you install seekline run the installation on a computer whith a
monotor, so you can see what the menu choises are, seekline doesn't modify
config.sys or autoexec.bat what seekline does is it writes a start.bat file
in the seekline directory it writes to the hard drive.
I forgot the 5.25 flopy problem, oh well, it was just a thought.
Well, write me soon!
Pete Persuric
Net-Tamer V 1.11 - Registered
Received on Sun Jul 12 1998 - 22:37:22 BST