Dectalk Linux Question

[Kirk Reiser]

Hi Jacob:  The only time any driver sends out a flush is on a
keystroke of some type.  The Dectalk family of synths are very
difficult to communicate with because they expect the flush character
to wait on them returning a character indicating that the clear has
been accomplished.  This is very difficult to do when you are watching
time by the millisecond so what we do instead is send the flush
character wait a short period of time and if we haven't received the
all clear responce go on anyway.  This happens because the Decs don't
return the character until they've emptied the synths buffer which as
you probably know with the Dectalks is very sluggish.  I will have to
look at the dectalk driver again though because it has been some time
since I wrote it and David Borowski rewrote it.

Suffice to say that the mechanism which sends out characters for the
softsynth is the same as for the other synths Dectalk included and
they are all the same in that speakup handles them all from the same
array of structures.  So there is still some confusion here or
miscommunication we need to clear up.

I am very happy to hear you are getting better results with your
rewrites.  I recommend also if you haven't already that you take a
look at the syftsynth driver because it is really a very very simple
driver.  I'm sure it is the most simple of all our drivers because I
didn't try to build in any techniques for dealing with the various
idiosynchracies of the actual hardware synths.

  Kirk

-- 

Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061