software synth on old laptop

[John Heim]

Do I have to use alsa sound drivers to use speakup with espeak?

I've installed alsa-utils and I've run alsaconf but there seems to be a 
problem. I get error messages that it can't find device 0. I have this 
really old laptop with a Sound Blaster 8 built in. I've loaded the correct 
modues manually 'modprobe snd-sb8' but no matter what I do, I can't seem to 
get sound at all via the alsa drivers.

The oss drivers work fine.  But I can't get speech-dispatcher to work with 
espeak. I saw that in the espeak config file, it calls aplay. And aplay 
won't work possibly because I'm not using the alsa drivers. Am I on the 
right track here?