On 18/03/2020 02:37, Karen Lewellen wrote:
Why cannot speech be built native to freedos the way it is, I understand, native to Linux distros, including the use of hardware?
FreeDOS, like other flavors of DOS, is a 16-bit, real-mode operating system. This means it runs within an extremely constrained environment: typically with access to a maximum of 640 kilobytes of memory, one taks at a time, and being able to address objects no bigger than 64 kilobytes. It is technically unrealistic to expect performing any kind of native voice synthesis in such configuration. The only realistic way would be to output text through a hardware port, like the RS-232, and let an external device do the sound generation. And that's exactly what screen readers do already. But it means of course that one must have an extra hardware synthesizer, which may or may not be an acceptable investment, depending on the ultimate goal. For people like Felix, who only want to play an old adventure game from time to time, this seems overkill - hence my idea to use VirtualBox instead, to run FreeDOS inside of it and connect an emulated software synthesizer. All this can be done for free, without any extra hardware, given that one has the patience and skills to set it all up.
Now, going back to FreeDOS: the only improvement I can think of is to include some sort of screen reader into the distribution. That is why I was interested in the PROVOX option, since PROVOX appears to have a license perfectly compatible with FreeDOS. Sadly, I was unable to make it output any sound, so I wonder whether it works at all. JAWS, on the other hand, works very well, but cannot be included into FreeDOS due to an incompatible license.
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