Dectalk isa model

[Adam Myrow]

I have had pretty bad luck with the Dectalk PC2 card that I have.  I can
get it to work some of the time with the CVS speakup.  If I have already
loaded the drivers from Windows, it will come up talking.  Otherwise, it
fails to load the drivers on cold boot, and requires another cold boot
before Windows can load the drivers again.  From a cold boot, the command
"dtload -v" gives the output:
waitmode p=c001 s = 1000
status -9
testkernel got dec
Loading kernel of 25386 bytes ( 69 relocs )
    cs:ip == 0040:0010   ss:sp == 07b3:0200
card is ready
dt_loadmem: addr = 00000400 size = 25386

Any attempt to load Speakup's Dectalk PC module at this point locks up the
computer.  Even when I can get it speaking, it causes the clock in Linux
to start losing time at an alarming rate.  This seems to be some sort of
interrupt issue.  For example, if I start playing a sound file or
streaming audio, I can make the sound skip just by pressing keypad enter
regardless of whether the Dectalk PC is speaking or not.  I've tried
changing the IO address of the Dectalk PC, but that made no difference.
I posted about some of my problems, especially the clock problem, on this
list, and nobody else seemed to be having them.  The only problem
universally recognized is that the Dectalk doesn't say words with
apostrophes correctly under Speakup.  I attempted to contact the developer
of the Dectalk PC driver, but my email bounced.  I've pretty much
concluded that the Dectalk PC driver isn't ready for production use.  If
you can get your hands on an old Double Talk or Accent PC, you'll have
better luck.  On the other hand, maybe mine is an isolated case.