Eric,
To prevent anyone from trying one of your suggestions, the dectalk
software is *very* legally copyright protected. While that project exists, it
cannot be used for software work in any operating system, Linux or
anything else without permission. something I imagine is stated on GitHub.
While your work may help well I have no idea how it will help, laughs, my
question, for Larry hart, is very specific.
He wants to run dos, use vocal eyes, but access his dectalk USB physical
unit, from his physical USB port but have vocal eyes access the device.
That program uses serial ports.
his goals is to use that screen reader to do some of his Linux things,
screen readers are not text to speech programs, but more correctly provide
a combination of monitor keyboard and other functions.
There is no existing screen reader in Linux that is fully comparative to
DOS programs.
Hopefully Joseph will contact me about the actual goal, but your side
thread has nothing to do with his exact goal.
On Sun, 8 Sep 2024, Eric Auer via Freedos-user wrote:
Hi Karen, I have checked the web regarding Dectalk USB:
https://www.tegakari.net/en/2017/10/dectalk_usb/ shows an image of a small
device indeed having both USB and serial port connectors, as well as a 6 volt
power connector. you can also run it for 1 hour from a 9 volt battery.
However, somebody on Linuxquestions.org complains about a 4 second delay when
using the device in RS232 mode with Linux a few years ago.
https://archive.org/details/dectalk-usb-user-manual
comes as a single text file, which mentions that RS232 mode is Dectalk
Express compatible, made by axsol access solutions, running Fonix Dectalk on
a Dragonball cpu with 16 mb of flash and 32 mb of ram. rs232 speed is not
given, but USB speed is 12 mbps, so the manual recommends to use USB.
You can find an open source version of the Dectalk engine on github now:
https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk
This probably allows you to use it for software speech output on Linux.
If you use any embedded controller with a serial, but no USB port built in,
you always have 2 choices to connect USB: Add a bridge chip to your circuit
or use an USB to serial cable which has the bridge chip built into it.
Either way, a modern operating system will see an USB-based serial port and
then let apps use that just like a serial port, but with a wider variety of
speed choices. In DOS, you would first have to load an USB and bridge driver
before you can access that not-physically-RS232 port at all. Running DOS in
an emulator is another option, letting you use the drivers of the host
operating system instead of needing DOS drivers.
I would assume that quite a few software speech synths and screen readers are
available for Linux, but I do not know which of them are how good.
Anyway, we now know that Dectalk USB can be switched to RS232 mode, which
lets you use it with actual RS232 ports. You can also use it in RS232 mode
with USB to serial cables if no physical RS232 port exists ini the PC, or if
you hope to improve transfer speed by using USB.
Both will offer some degree of Dectalk Express compatibility, which is good
in case the native USB mode of Dectalk USB differs too much from what DOS
Dectalk drivers expect.
Regards, Eric
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