From: jdashiel AT eagle1 DOT eaglenet DOT com Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 20:18:56 -0500 (EST) To: opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Subject: [opendos] opendos and speech synthesizers Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Precedence: bulk I have downloaded the version of opendos found at: http://www.caldera.com/dos/dos.htm after having read and agreed to the license terms. I tried opendos with two different speech synthesizer programs one being provox current version and the other being tinytalk current version. The results obtained indicate to me that there are at least two problems on my computer system using opendos 7.01. By way of background, I run an american megatrends machine with a bios date of 7/7/91. The machine is a 386dx with math coprocessor and a speech synthesizer hardware unit being a doubletalk lite. The importance of this unit is that it plugs into com2 and uses co correction, the synthesizer plugs into and uses port services of com1. The provox screen reader makes a file called pv.log which gathers information as written to the screen on boot up for the user to view it later. The tinytalk screen reader does no such thing. This is how I found out this much. The identical behavior that happened when either of these screen readers was loaded was by way of a Morse Code analogy continuous dash beeps with very short pauses between them. The only way I could break the behavior was to reboot the computer. I say that there are at least two of these problems because of an experiment I tried. I removed any invocation line for speech synthesizer software from the autoexec.bat file and rebooted the computer. What happened was the same beeping behavior as stated above. Now, the question is what does a beep like that mean in opendos? I couldn't capture the error thatwas generated when I tried the autoexec.bat file without the screen reader commands in it. More to the point, does anybody have any ideas for things that might be tried or fixes that might be implemented? Because of the beeping and the opendos failure to bring up my screen reader software, I never made it as far as the setup program. Finally don't feel bad, every version of dos from 5.00 on up I've installed has been painful but in other ways equally unpleasant. I've got msdos 6.22 back on the system tonight or I'd not be writing this note now. There was one strange thing more I noticed in the pv.log file which might help. The dos that was started up when opendos was tried was msdos according to the pv.log file. I used the dodl701.exe file for this installation and it had ibmbio.com and ibmdos.com in it when I downloaded it. jude