RE: VMware/JFW issues

["Watson, Keith" <kwatson grtk com>]

Lloyd,

Well I'm no technical expert but I have learned a bit about the way JAWS
works over the past month or so. Being a new user to the software. It seems
that JFW in a Windows install uses a .DLL to "grab" the video stream and
pull what it needs to translate to speech. I learned this because I had Zoom
Text installed before the JFW installed. As ZoomText does the same thing, it
interferes with the JFW .DLL in the video chain and JFW acts weird. 

This said, think about what VMware is doing. It's emulating an OS. When JFW
installs in the emulation what is being fed to the video chain is not being
fed directly back through to the hardware. Its being routed back through the
original OS and then to the hardware. This would tend to make me believe
that JFW would give you partial to no response. 

Remember, I'm no Gates Guru, or Linux Guru for that matter. But this is what
my thinking on the matter leads me to believe. If anyone else concurs let me
know. If I'm full of hot air, feel free to burst my bubble, you won't hurt
my feelings.

Keith Watson

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Lloyd G. Rasmussen [mailto:lras loc gov]
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 7:45 AM
To: blinux-list redhat com
Subject: Re: VMWare/JFW issues


I would guess that VMWare is not a good enough imitation of Windows for
software text-to-speech to run in it.  If you can do an install into a
hardware synth of some kind you might have slightly better performance.
But as far as I know, this might not work at all.  Is your sound card tied
up doing Linux sounds already?  Do you have IBM ViaVoice for Linux already
installed?  (ViaVoice and Eloquence shipped with JFW are essentially the
same text-to-speech engine).

At 03:56 PM 6/20/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi. I've recently been attempting to get a working VMWare/win98
>installation using JFW, but I'm encountering quite a few strange
>problems, and I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced something
>like this before?
>
>I was using an ancient version of JFW 3.0, but this simply refused to
>work on windows; I received the infamous BSOD whenever JFW was
>launched. So I decided to grab the latest 3.5 demo, hoping that the
>problems would be solved.
>
>The demo starts nicely, and the intro speaks. The demo introduction
>sounds as if it's pre-recorded, while the remainder of the
>installation is synthesized speech through the soundcard. For some
>reason, the synthesized speech is pure static, though the occasional
>sound effects play nicely. Additionally, every other sound which
>windows makes works, so I'm sure the card is configured correctly. I
>know that the static is synthesized speech because I can occasionally
>make out fragments of words behind the static; I can't link this
>phenomena to anything, however.
>
>I've emailed HJ tech support, but I haven't received a response
>yet. I'm not sure if this is due to the fact that I'm only running a
>demo and there are paying customers who need help first, whether there
>is normally a few-day delay for support, or whether VMWare either
>isn't supported or isn't well-understood. :) I'm considering going to
>the VMWare folks next, but I don't know quite what to say. "Hey, guys?
>Your SB16 emulation works in 99% of the cases which I've found, but in
>this instance . . . " Plus I'm not even sure which piece of software
>is originating this problem, and I can't reboot to windows to test
>it. Has anyone else experienced this?
>
>This isn't my only problem, however. I'd like to use my soundcard,
>instead of my dectalk, for speech synthesis under VMWare. For some
>reason, when VMWare opens up the serial ports upon startup, it seems
>to bombard the port with a large amount of binary data -- such a large
>amount in fact that I can't seem to cleanly access the serial ports
>after powering down. I've tried killing every Emacspeak session on my
>system and using VMWare, but as soon as I start Emacspeak after
>powering down VMWare the gibberish starts. Restarting Emacspeak or the
>speech server doesn't solve the problem either; I'm forced to reboot
>my system. Ideally I'd like to run Emacspeak and VMWare simultaneously
>(while deactivating the Emacspeak speech server, of course), since I
>usually have dozens of Emacs buffers open, and it's a pain to reload
>all of the files and webpages which I usually have open. Has anyone
>experienced anything like this and, if so, is there a solution?
>
>Thanks.
>
Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service f/t Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress    (202) 707-0535  <lras loc gov>
<http://www.loc.gov/nls/>
HOME:  <lras sprynet com>   <http://lras.home.sprynet.com

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