On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Mike wrote:
> I've been playing around lately with a pretty complete TRS-80 Model 1
> setup( LNW EI, RS EI, Holmes EI (real cool), Plug&Power, LightPen,
> Voice Synth, Floppies, Exatrons, Plotter, Quick Printer, LinePirnters,
> Acoustic and dc modems, sans software) . Anyone have some trs-dos or
> newdos systems disks and software and I'm especially looking for the
> software driver to run the voice synthesizer.
You DON'T need one.
It is set to accept PHONEMES, NOT English language words. To use it, you
need to spell phonetically from a chart of their phonemes. There are
additional characters added for some phonemes, particularly to handle the
multitudinous vowel sounds. That results in some scrambled LOOKING
words. For example, IIRC, "H38L8^U" (second to last character is an up
arrow) will produce a marginally acceptable "Hello".
I have a copy of the docs and get get you a list of the phonemes and what
letters to use for each.
There DOES exist some software (IIRC, after-market) that attempts to
translate English words into their equivalent phonetic spellings.
Though you can imagine how that task is tough enough to get through.
Such software is generally VERY unsatisfactory. And even with careful
phoneme translation, it will never sound better than "a martian in a tin
can".
Some of the fancier software operates as a TSR, and on appropriate hotkeys
will read whole screen, content at cursor position, etc.
But I have a blind friend who used to program using one; she ran it at a
considerably faster rate than normal speech, and said that you get used to
it; that eventually it's just like a friend with a very heavy accent.
BTW, most blind folk are NOT happy about transition from TRS-80 and MS-DOS
text mode over to Windoze and WWW with excessive visuals.
> there. It doesn't have the floptical in it and a 'b sd' boot command
> returns a read capacity error on the scsi hard disk.
Will the Insite Floptical fit? I have two, and would consider selling
one.
I thought that the Next used a 2.8M (4M unformatted) Barium Ferrite disk.
The Floptical is 20M by adding optical alignment to Barium Ferrite disks.
You COULD use the expensive 20M flopticals in a 2.8M drive and just ignore
the extra optical stuff.
--
Fred Cisin cisin_at_xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
2210 Sixth St. (510) 644-9366
Berkeley, CA 94710-2219
Received on Wed Jul 19 2000 - 12:09:26 BST