Hi Mateusz, hi speech experts,
>> DJGPP is a complete 32-bit C/C++ development system for Intel >> 80386 (and higher) PCs running DOS. > I am saying that DOS is a 16-bit, real-time operating system. You say > that DJGPP is more powerful. Yes, but DJGPP is not DOS. Then of course, > one could imagine a 32-bit DOS-like system with 386 memory management, > protected mode etc but it simply would not be called DOS. Actually the FD32 project is or was about running the DOS kernel in protected mode, but the performance gains were small. I have used DJGPP myself for tasks where I wanted many megabytes of RAM directly available and of course you do notice that DOS will not do anything in the background. So for example I buffered file I/O during busy periods and only called DOS to write data files later when it did not disturb me that I had to wait until DOS was done. So I would say if you only need real-time at moments without DOS kernel (or BIOS) interaction and if you need much RAM directly available without the hassles of EMS or XMS, then DJGPP is nice! About the feasibility of speech synthesis in DOS: If you use the SoundBlaster AWE, you can load samples into the RAM of the sound card and "play" speech like an instrument :-) Games usually take either the protected mode or EMS (or XMS) route to access their sample library. The PC speaker speech TSR contains a few dozen, of course low quality, phoneme samples in only tens of kB RAM. So yes, it can be done, but which modern computer can still be connected to a SoundBlaster? You would have to use HDA / AC97. Which a few modern DOS media players are actually able to use. In short, I think it is feasible to do this. But remember that games are very different from a screen reader TSR which has to run in the background without disturbing normal DOS usage. This would be pretty hard but still feasible. On the other hand, it just is a lot easier to run DOS in dosemu or a VM and make use of sound drivers, speech synthesizers and infrastructure running on the host operating system with all fancy multitasking and 32 or 64 bit memory and disk management features readily available. Many speech synth and screen reader software packages for DOS and other systems have been named in this thread, so I would be glad to hear more about features and requirements of those which have a free license. Maybe somebody could publish a howto for using them with FreeDOS, either on raw hardware or in a VM or dosemu? Thanks :-) Exiting to have such featurs for DOS! Regards, Eric PS: auersoft.eu is down at the moment due to an IP address change, let me know if you want to help fixing that ;-) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
