/dev/synth and DOSemu, test results

[Adam Myrow]

Hello, everybody.  I thought I'd share my experiences with Speakup's
/dev/synth device and DOSemu.  I was wondering if it were possible to use
your existing synthesizer under DOSemu via the /dev/synth device.  So, I
took the following steps.  I am currently using an Accent SA, so these
steps apply to that synthesizer in some cases.  I first logged in as root
and typed "mknod /dev/synth c 10 25."  I tried this because I noticed a
boot message from Speakup that said:
speakup:  initialized device: /dev/synth, node (MAJOR 10, MINOR 25)

After doing that, I tried echoing text at /dev/synth as follows.  echo
"This is a test." >/dev/synth
I immediately heard "This is a test."  I then turned off Speakup entirely
by pressing print-screen and repeated the command.  I once again heard
"This is a test."  So, I decided to try out DOSemu with /dev/synth as
com1.  I did this as follows.  I already had Dosemu set up to behave like
older versions where it uses a global configuration file instead of
creating per user instances of Freedos.  So, I modified my
/etc/dosemu.conf making the "com1" line read:
$_com1 = "/dev/synth"
Now, I started up DOSemu and tried echoing text to com1 and it worked
fine.  Now, I got a floppy containing Tinytalk for DOS for the Accent SA.
I typed "ttalk c1" to tell it to use Com1 and the results were as follows.
I got a few garbage characters at the start and then Tinytalk started
speaking.  It was choppy, as if the screen were refreshing slower than
expected, but fairly usable.  It would read some words as if they were
split between two lines.  I thought it was rather interesting, however.  I
next intend to try Jaws for DOS, which is the only other DOS screen reader
I have access to.  I will report again when I have tried it.  Just thought
some of you who still use a lot of DOS applications might find this
experiment interesting.  Oh, by the way, for any review functions to work
under DOSemu with Speakup hanging around, it is necessary to start DOSemu
with the "-k" flag to use raw keyboard mode.  Hope this information is
useful to somebody.