ancient speech synthesizers

[Richard Villa]

Back in the days of dos, there use to be a utility for Phoenix bios that you 
could use to make changes.  It worked well with the various screen readers 
of the time.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marcel Oats" <moats at orcon.net.nz>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 11:17 PM
Subject: Re: ancient speech synthesizers


> Most Mbs now have the BPB (bios parameter block) stored outside the
> actual file that makes the bios.  Normally, the bios file that you
> can save, should be around 512 kb in size.  If we're going to get
> into a discussion on accessing bios technology, we might want to take
> it off-list, but I believe you would still be faced with the issue of
> different mb manufacturers using different formats.  Indeed, Asus
> (the maker of the board on all systems here accept for the server)
> use a completely different bpb format to Gigabyte.
>
> Ideally, as mentioned earlier, it'd be a case of manufactures writing
> a utility, or perhaps a third party writing the skeleton, and the
> manufacturers writing templates to fit into the infrastructure.
>
> Marcel
> At 11:21 Ay M 13/10/2006, you wrote:
>>I seem to have a memory of some manufacturers stating in sales information
>>that their MBs come with software to change bios settings from windows. I
>>think it might have been Gigabyte. Doing some checking now, I can find a
>>Gigabyte board that allows altering boot order without accessing BIOS
>>directly (the board I am mentioning here can be found at www.dabs.com with
>>quicklink 43rtws). Also the BIOS can be accessed from windows, and has 
>>been
>>for a long time, my asus p4pe MB came with software that could save BIOS 
>>to
>>a file, or flash BIOS from a file, from in windows, so an app wouldn't 
>>even
>>need to work directly on the BIOS hardware if the file format was known
>>(you would hope the manufacturer would know that).
>>
>>From
>>Michael Whapples
>>
>>Farhan writes:
>>
>> > HI, i'm not sure if this applies to the current conversation
>> here, but an interesting note.
>> > Toshiba makes a bios utility for windows you can read everything
>> with in the bios, change the boot order and all that. I'm not sure
>> how you could actually program one of those for LInux, but maybe
>> you could contact Toshiba and talk to thems.
>> > On 10/12/2006 at 4:41 Gregory Nowak said
>> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> > Hash: SHA1
>> >
>> > On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 07:21:04PM +1300, Marcel Oats wrote:
>> >> The other think we could
>> >> think about, are why companies such as Asus have not made a
>> piece of windows
>> >> software that is able to read the bios parameter block on their
>> >> boards, and allow the user to change them, in a nice accessible
>> >> interface.
>> >
>> > Why limit it to Asus, why not ask the same thing of all companies
>> > producing motherboards and bios code? Actually, I think that if AMI
>> > and Award were to include it in the base bios, the mb companies
>> > probably wouldn't pull it out.
>> >
>> > \as for the why, I'm willing to bet that it's because they don't care,
>> > because they think the RND would be too expensive, and probably
>> > because these companies think the market for something like this is
>> > too small. Granted, something like this wouldn't probably cost too
>> > much to develop. While we're discussing things to think about, if such
>> > a utility were developed, it would be nice to find it on the CD that
>> > comes with the mb, instead of having to pay for yet another program,
>> > because you have a disability, and most other people don't. Oh one
>> > more thing, let's not limit it to windows, arguably, I think such a
>> > utility would be easier to program as a gnu/linux text-based
>> > application, though since I haven't done hardware driver programming
>> > under gnu/linux, I could be wrong in my estimate of the difficulty 
>> > level.
>> >
>> > Greg
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > - --
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>> > (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first)
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>> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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