Scrollback and DEC-Talk Express

[Tony Baechler]

Kerry Hoath wrote:
> Handshaking with the dectalk express has allways been a problem; in fact 
> asap would lock up nicely if you used the type command to read a long text 
> file.
>   



Hi,

Your explanation was very interesting and was exactly what I was trying 
to figure out.  Yes, the kernel has a scrollback buffer, which is what I 
wanted to know in the first place.  However, you seem to be overlooking 
something or I'm not understanding.  I'm not feeling well so it could be 
my fault.  That is that in very old versions of Speakup from cvs, I 
could easily cat those same README files to the exact same synthesizer 
and speech would go on forever.  I once let it read every single boot 
message from the kernel starting to the login prompt with no problem.  
It's only now in newer git versions that the 4 KB bug shows up, so I 
still consider it a bug that hasn't been fixed.  I admit that I know 
little of handshaking and serial communication, but before there was no 
problem and now there is.  This can be easily demonstrated with the grml 
1.1rc1 live CD, which still had unlimited text output with speech not 
stopping.  Apparently the final 1.1 release upgraded the Speakup version 
so probably has the bug.  I don't know exactly when the bug happened but 
it goes back to my kernel build from the April git clone and probably 
before that.  I don't remember if the Shane Etch CD has this or not, I 
would have to check.