Hi Jim, Yeah, now that you mention it I do recall Window-Eyes 3.1 and earlier had problems with the command prompt window. If you wanted to actually run an MS Dos program with speech you had to switch over to Vocal-Eyes, Jaws for Dos, ASAP, or some other Dos screen reader at the time. However, now that most people don't need it current versions of Window-Eyes such as v7.5 work fine with the Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 command prompt window. I use Window-Eyes all the time with scare, frotz, and various other dos interactive fiction interpreters as well as various commandline compilers like MinGW and Javac. So Window-eyes command prompt support added in version 4, I think, has been a huge help to me. As I recall they added support about the time Windows XP was first coming out. Unfortunately, in the main that was a little too late since all the Dos games like Lone Wolf, Trek 99, the various PCS Games,your games, etc all began being rewritten for Windows so command prompt support was just a tad bit late for Window-eyes users.
As for recorded speech I have to agree with you. It is a lot of work and isn't at all as flexable as using Sapi 5 directly. Unfortunately, not everyone has high-quality Sapi compatible voices, and I seam to recall getting a few not so happy remarks from gamers to include a better voice with my games. Which only proves most people want something for nothing. On Linux the issue with using direct TTS is even more problematic. We have Speech-Dispatcher which is something like Sapi, but unfortunately since it is open source if you buy a brand new Del with Ubuntu 10.10 on it the only Speech-Dispatcher speech drivers you get are open source drivers for ESpeak, Festival, and other open source speech engines like that. They're not exactly the best quality voices out there for Linux. Of course you can buy the Cepstral voices, AT&T voices, Eloquence, etc for Linux which are far superior, but then you have to go through the hastle of finding the latest Speech-Dispatcher commercial drivers or recompile them yourself. That I.E. is the biggest downfall Linux has to aaccessibility in my opinion. Most Linux users won't fool with it to acquire the better TTS voices. It is for that reason I've been thinking about writing my own custom speech API for Linux. As part of my G3D engine it wouldn't be under the Linux GPL license so could include up to date commercial speech drivers for the AT&T Voices, Cepstral Voices, Eloquence, Dectalk, you name it. When they run the package manager like dpkg it would automatically install my custom commercial speech drivers. All the end user would have to do is buy and install the commercial TTS engine they want. Which sort of brings me around to my point. If I create an RPG game as we we were talking about earlier there is only two ways to pass along a large amount of info to the gamer. One, we could display text directly to the screen either via the Windows command prompt window or via a terminal window on Mac and Linux operating systems. Two, the other is to tap into the operating systems TTS speech API and simply speak outloud all the necessary information. Both have advantages and disadvantages to consider. If we display text to the screen that makes the code extremely portable so that the game can be recompiled for Pacmates, IPhones, and probably any number of handheld devices as well as various types of PCs. As someone who isn't strictly speaking a Windows-only user the idea of making the product as portable as possible is good. Plus for screen readers that can read a command prompt and terminal window that gives them the ability to review the screen on demand, look up spellings, and things like that.That is something you don't get when shooting the text directly to Sapi. On the downside not all screen readers handles a command prompt window exactly the same so the process may be more manual for some than others. Plus I know from experience one big problem is you have to be careful that the text doesn't scroll off the screen, or wrap in the wrong place. Text formatting errors in cases like that are nasty. On the other hand using text to speech directly resolves some issues but adds a few problems of its own. With Sapi it doesn't matter how the text is formatted, weather it scrolls off screen, etc because it is just speaking outloud what it is given to speak. I'd say the biggest advantage Sapi is got is that you don't need a screen reader at all to play said game. Just start the game and it will speak everything you want/need on demand. Unfortunately, if you want to look up the spelling of a person, place, or thing in the game you can't. There really is no way to really review the text word by word character by character as you would with a screen reader. This was my biggest complaint with Winfrotz TTS as I could never go back and review something Sapi mangled or I wasn't sure how a certain named was spelled. Plus API implamentation changes from platform to platform so serious modifications are in the works to produce versions for alternative platforms. To say nothing of the fact as Philip Bennefall is finding out some engines like Neospeech don't always work as expected even though you follow the Microsoft API docs to the letter. I've never figured that one out, but it is a strange quark I've encountered myself. As far as Pat Benatar goes I was reading not too long ago in a music magazine that she and Neil got into a disagreement just before Crimes of Passion was released what the chord progression for Hit Me With your Best Shot should be. Since Neil was the guitar gooru and author of the song she let him keep the chord progression he wanted to use, and that's the one that got released on the album. Since they gave an example of Pat's suggested chord progression I got out my strat and tried her version and liked it better. Not that the oofficial chords are bad, but hers was probably a bit better suited to her voice. Hmmmm...How many times does the lead singer of a band out smart her resident guitar gooru? Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. 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