Hi all,

I currently have Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 installed, with the Mallard add-on Sound, Graphics and Aircraft (SGA) upgrade running in DosBox 0.74 with the D-Fend reloaded front end. (I also have Aircraft & Scenery Designer, as well as Aircraft & Adventure Factory installed).

The Mallard SGA provided machines with SoundBlaster cards to be able to produce a synthesized voice for communications within the game, basically text-to-speech. This was in addition to the broader addition of digital sounds.

Flight Sim 4 runs fine, and the digital engine and other sounds are working fine. The only component that isn't working is the synthesized speech.

The only lead I've found from all over the internet is courtesy of Art:

Art wrote on 2021-05-18, 13:12:

I don't know if it's considered to be a sound driver, but "Sound, Graphics & Aircraft Upgrade" for Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 requires SBTALKER.EXE and SBTALK.BAT from the Sound Blaster installation package to be able to speak.

Now, full disclosure. I'm not very good with computers and this sort of thing. Art's quote above is from a thread providing sound related drivers required in addition to what DosBox provides to get some games going. This was helpful for me in understanding that the reason I can't get synthesized speech going is because the SGA Upgrade expects Soundblaster drivers and files to be installed, which of course they aren't.

So, I downloaded the sound driver pack provided in the above thread and configured my FS4 install as follows:

In my mounted C:, I have two directories - 1) FLTSIM4 containing the Flight Sim 4 installation and 2) BLASTER, containing the SBTalker and SBtalk.Bat files. Actually, I copied everything in the SBTalker.EXE folder (from the download sound pack file) into my BLASTER folder.

I added the following lines (in Dfend Reloaded) to the Autoexec.bat section:
C:
CD\BLASTER
SBTALK

This works well, the screen confirming that SmoothTalker has loaded and is 'using driver BLASTER.DRV' (note that the FLTSIM4 install also has a BLASTER.drv file - could there be a conflict?).

Proceeding then to boot Flight Sim 4 works well and I continue to hear the digitised sounds and what not. However, when a communication occurs, the game locks up. It locks up prior to any speech occurring.

I think this might be related to the conflict between blaster.drv files (one in my FLTSIM4 folder, one in the BLASTER folder) but I'm probably wrong. I'm at a bit of a loss at this point. I thought I might play around setting the sound path but I doubt that will work. The only other thing I can think of is memory limitations with all those add-ons I've installed.

So, I'm looking for insight and suggestions about what I might try to get synthesized speech working in Flight Sim 4. Note this is all within DosBox, I'm not going through Win 3.1 or anything like that. I think the most likely thing is that I simply don't understand how to correctly configure the additional sound blaster files that I've downloaded so any suggestions will be warmly received.

Thanks everyone.

Trent