Re: dectalk etc. vs soundblaster (fwd)

[Travis Siegel <tsiegel celine-dion com>]

On Sun, 26 Jan 1997, John Schucker wrote:

> I realize this is slightly offtopic, but ... many DOS spech packages 
> allow you to use the sblaster as a synth?  The only one I know of is 
> tinytalk.

Asap for windows is another that lets you use the soundblaster as a speech
synthesizer.  I know there's more, but w/o looking at my
ftp://softcon.com/speech/index.htm file, I can't tell you for sure just
now. *grin*

> BTW, one way in which the sblaster is slow is in response time, and I'm 
> not really sure if anybody can really overcome that in code.  And I'm not 
> sure how this would map to linux, but in DOS, the sblaster's speech 
> driver is a memory hog.  It can't actually do speech itself, which is 
> what the driver is needed for.

It's slow, mainly because it offers no facilities for speech buffer
flushing.  Thus, there's no real way to tell the card to shut up when you
press say the alt key.  Therefore, the speech programs need to feed text
to it a bit more slowly, so that they can stop the speech themselves when
required to do so.  There's other problems with it too.  Download asaw,
and read it's documentation section on soundblaster to see why it's not a
recomended interface, but if it's all ya got, then it's certainly better
than nothing.

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