interesting experiment.

[Kerry Hoath]

There were pc-speaker sound drivers for Linux, but the
cpu overhead was awful.
To run the speaker you need to use one of the timers on the 8259
and there is no ability to use interrupts or dma so you must sit in busy wait
loops to get the timing correct.
You need to convert pcm to pwm and feed it to the speaker and we don't even have a free
software speech engine for Linux yet that is of good enough quality
and stability and responsiveness for the applicaiton we want.
Let's be realistic, most modern boards have soundcards on them,
and something half decent can be had for $10US so
gone are the days of pc-speaker and parallel port dongles
for sound.
Most modern laptops even have soundcars in them.
The lack of sound drivers at boot isn't hte problem
for speakup, it is that a tts engine takes up a hell of a lot
of kernel memory which then isn't swapable.
On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 05:04:04PM -0400, Alex Snow wrote:
> Hi All,
> I was just thinking: Would it be possible to right drivers to use the pc
> speaker as a synth in speakup? Then for those who don't have a hardware
> synth that would work.
> ----- Original Message -----

-- 
Kerry Hoath:  kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or  kerry at gotss.spice.net.au
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