Hi Thomas,
My first talking computer was an Apple 2e with an echo hardware synthesizer
that I got in 1985.
Back then there was no copy protection as you had to copy the screen reader
program to the 5.25 floppy disk and run both.
There was no hard disks so everything had to be loaded from floppy disk.
BAUD MAGAZINE (Blind Apple Users Discussion- Joe Jovanelli) was on cassette
and he sold floppy disks of text games that the blind could play.
Everything on the disks was open source so you could looke at the code and
change any game.
I played Kidnapped, StoneVille Manor, Monopoly, Oregon Trail, Eamon
adventures and colossal cave.
In 1988 I bought a GEM game machine which was a TRS 80 Radio Shack computer
with a built in voice synthesizer.
It was designed to play only games.
The games i played wer on cartriges that cost about $40 or $50 each.
I bought their bowling game that I eventually re-created in DOS in 1995.
The GEM machine made sounds of beeps and bops that came from a sound
generating chip.
In bowling it made a boop sound at each inch running from the left to the
right on the bowling alley.
If you didn't throw your ball it would do it again and again.
When it reached a pin, it made three higher beeps to represent the left
side, middle and right side of the pin.
To bowl your ball you hit the enter key.
Of course if you already heard the pin sound, it was too late to bowl, so
you had to listen to the sounds and anticipate when the pin sound would be
made.
The only other one i remember was a downhill skiing game.
When the Macintosh was released in 1994, suddenly the blind couldn't use
apple computers anymore as there was no syntehsizer or screen reader
designed for it. I had to get an IBM computer that had three DOS screen
readers, JAWS for DOS, VocalEyes and ASAP.
---
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