Hello everyone! I am blown away, in the most positive sense of the word, by the fruitful discussion my original post seems to have sparked, or rekindled. For this discussion to have its heated moments is only natural as emotions, passions and frustrations are involved. If there is one point of constructive criticism I would like to make, it is to draw attention to the fact that some remarks have ranked rather high on my personal confrontational scale. While this does not render these remarks false in any way, they might come across as intimidating or, depending on personal associations, eristic. I want to appeal to all of us, explicitly including myself, if we feel we need to correct someone, to always do so gently and charitably. Here's to the accessibility of FreeDOS, and to tomes full of knowledge rather than dictionaries of limitations. Best, Felix
Am Fr., 20. März 2020 um 11:01 Uhr schrieb Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de>: > > > 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 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
