[Blindapple] Emulating Echo

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,
I'm not surprised it wasn't that easy to find out what Textalker is doing.
Textalker is no doubt communicating with the Echo card via its own custom
protocol, not using standard slot communication methods like for Super
Serial cards and serial ports.  This is because the Echo card doesn't have
the Text to speech logic onboard.  Textalker is responsible for all the
translation from text to control signals sent to the Echo card to generate
the speech sounds.
As further proof that Echo doesn't accept standard communication, my GS has
an Echo in slot 4.  If, from Applesoft, I pr#4 my 3.5 disk in slot 5 boots,
since aparently there's nothing of interest in slot 4's memory space.  On
the other hand, if I put a Doubletalk in slot 4, then a pr#4 will let me use
Doubletalk speech, as the Doubletalk card does have all the TTS logic
onboard.
Jayson.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Baechler" <tony at baechler.net>
To: "Blind Apple Discussions" <blindapple at jaybird.no-ip.info>
Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Blindapple] Emulating Echo


> Hi.  Yes, thanks.  I found it.  It won't boot though.  I think DOS is
> missing.  You must use a boot disk first.  I ran the slot fixer and set it
> to slot 1.  I know from experimentation that A2 always dumps everything
> sent to slot 1 to a2.printlog.  Yet every time I run it, it loads but
> a2.printlog is empty.  I guess Textalker looks in slot 1 first as I told
> it, but nothing is there so it loads anyway.  That doesn't make sense to
me
> but so it would appear.  Somehow it doesn't directly send to whatever slot
> the Echo is in but the Echo still talks.  I wasn't planning on that.
>
> At 03:12 AM 7/29/2005 -0400, you wrote:
> >In case you don't still have it, the copy of Textalker 1.3 I was given is
> >still at the following URL.
> >http://jaybird.no-ip.info/disks/talking/tt13.dsk
> >Hope this helps.
> >Jayson.
>
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