/dev/synth and DOSemu, test results

[Gregory Nowak]

Please do report back. I've stuck around with speakup under dosemu, because I thought there would be a problem with assigning /dev/synth as com1 because of baud rate and all that stuff.
I've got a doubletalk pc, and considered using provox7 under dosemu tricking it into thinking my synth was a doubletalk lt on com 1 which would be actually /dev/synth. Wasn't sure if that would work though. I guess it does after reading your post.
Greg


On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 06:49:52PM -0600, Adam Myrow wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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