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Re: Special needs GS?

Aaron Howell wrote:

In article <usOdndBtKIi18GDenZ2dnUVZ_s6dnZ2d@comcast.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:


Most "adaptive" software was written before the IIgs, so it was
almost certainly used in 8-bit compatibility mode.  The Echo card
was widely supported by speech synthesis programs for use by those
who could not speak.


THere were a couple of ifferent echo cards.
The standard echo (and the echo 2 series),
were a hardware speech synthesizer.
Along with being used by people who couldn't talk, they were widely used amongst the blind community,
in conjunction with a package called Textalker from The American Printing House.
(Early versions were from Street Electronics).


Street didn't do anyone any favors by calling several different
cards "Echo ][".  You almost need a card photo to tell what model
is what.  Ironically, the other "worst offender" in the ambiguous
name department is the "Adaptive Firmware Card", which refers to
several quite different models.

You'd think it was harder to invent names than cards.  ;-)


There were dos 3.3 and prodos versions of textalker,
and a version for the gs, which could operate in both 8 or 16 bit environments.
If you're lucky enough to have an Echo plus, That also had the ability to play synthesized music,


It accommodated two AY-3-891x chips for Mockingboard-like sound.


and had a limited vocabulary voice which was of much higher quality

> (it was female and sounded surprisingly human for its time).

Most (all?) of the Echo cards used the TI 5220 LPC synthesis chip
(Speak'n'Spell-derived), and supported this "high quality female
voice" for a dictionary of utterances that had been professionally
encoded for the chip.  The accompanying software may or may not have
supported it--in fact, I think it became an extra cost software option.


The original disk witch came with the echo plus had a loadable ampersand routine which allowed its advanced features to be controlled.
Finally, there were a limited number of other applications,
some tutorials and a word processor called Talking Text Writer, which could also use the echo hardware.
There exists a serial speech synthesizer called Cricket. which was the Apple //c version of the Echo,


Yes, same functionality, but with a serial interface.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."