Got the Dectalk PC2 working!

[ameer armaly]

?What's the difference between it and the original dec pc?


On Sat, 1 May 2004, Adam Myrow wrote:

> For anybody who has the Dectalk PC 2 rather than the original Dectalk PC,
> I want to post what I had to do to get it working, and point out a slight
> bug in Speakup.  First, I re-built my kernel with all of Speakup as
> modules.  Next, I downloaded the dec_pc.tar.gz file from the Speakup FTP
> sight and unpacked it in /usr/local/lib/dec_pc.  Next, I modified the
> dec_pc.conf file, changing the top line to "io=0x260" which reflects the
> setting of my Dectalk PC.  After attempts to load the Dectalk drivers
> resulted in no speech, I decided to copy the drivers that I already have
> for my Dectalk PC2 in place of the supplied drivers.  Thus, I replaced the
> following files with my versions.  kernel.sys, lts.exe, ph.exe, and
> cmd.exe.  Lastly, I copied the file dtpcdic.dic and renamed it to
> dtpc.dic.  this replaced the dtpc.dic supplied with the archive.  After
> all that, I could successfully run the command "dtload -t" and type text
> and have it echoed back.  However, when I tried to load the Speakup
> module, I got errors to the effect that Speakup couldn't find the Dectalk
> PC.  It turns out that Speakup doesn't recognize 0x260 as a valid address
> for the Dectalk PC.  The solution is to modify line 30 of speakup_decpc.c
> to add 0x260 to the list of base addresses and re-build the kernel and
> modules.  Actually, you may be able to get away with just re-building the
> modules, but I went ahead and rebuilt the kernel as well to be safe.  The
> new line 30 looks like this.
> static int synth_portlist[] = { 0x340, 0x350, 0x240, 0x250, 0x260, 0 };
>
> Now, my Dectalk PC works!  The only gripe I have is that words with
> apostrophes aren't pronounced correctly.  It's treating apostrophes as
> spaces, so that "it's" gets spoken as "it s."  Also, there is no pause
> between sentences.  The sluggishness mentioned in the Readme isn't as bad
> as I was expecting from reading list archives.  Anyway, thanks to all
> those who have helped in supporting various synthesizers in Speakup and
> especially those who are working on making software synthesizers work.
> While I personally prefer hardware synthesizers, having the option of
> using software synthesizers will open Speakup to a lot more users, and
> thus, Linux in turn.
>
>
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