tripletalk (was 4DOS)

[Nick Stockton]

*smile* thanks very much Kirk for the info.
I thought I might ask you if a DoubleTalk LT gets zapped by a serial port 
and all of a sudden things like the greeting message and exception 
dictionaries are gone but the synth it's self can still speak and work do 
you think finding the latest ROM version and flashing the DoubleTalk would 
help at all?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kirk Reiser" <kirk at braille.uwo.ca>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: tripletalk (was 4DOS)


>I can't tell you what the exact hardware is because I don't remember
> or maybe never knew.  It is I suspect a small pci board which can be
> placed in a computer or a separate box just like the Accent's were.
> It has interfacing circuitry that tie the pci bus and/or the USB uart
> to a RC Systems Doubletalk chip.  I don't know what Randy is calling
> that chip but it is based on the v8650 board but made into a LSI chip.
> That same chip is used in the bookport, book currier and a number of
> other products. The uart also services the rs-232C connector.
>
> It is true that Access Solutions were not forth coming in the
> beginning.  I suspect they thought they could make it on their own
> with the Microsoft Windows community but soft synths have been gaining
> a lot of prominence and so the hardware synth world is shrinking
> radically.  They have become much more helpful over the years.  I just
> haven't had time to write drivers to support the pci and usb portions
> of the device.
>
> As for the firmware, it is the same or almost the same as on the
> Doubletalk family of synths.  How Randy missed the bug is beyond me
> and for that matter him as well.  It's obviously a not very often used
> feature of the firmware but one I particularly like because it allows
> us to find out which version and form of the firmware is being used.
> Those version/parametre strings are slightly different for the groups
> Randy has sold to and supports.  For example the original Microtalk
> version of the firmware has a secondary flush command '^y' which only
> flushes up to the next newline/carriage return characters for software
> that supported it.  That gave ASAP the ability to provide a feature
> which could allow one to quickly scan through a document being read by
> just tapping the shift key to immediately move on to the next line.
>
>
> Kirk Reiser The Computer Braille Facility
> e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca University of Western Ontario
> phone: (519) 661-3061
>
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