VOGONS


First post, by arfy

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hey, here's a possible feature for inclusion in future. Currently, the text output from the emulated machine is inaccessible to a screen reader, so that, effectively, a user of the program can't see what dos, and the programs run in the emulation, say. I'm guessing text output in text modes of dos are just sent to sdl, and printed? If this is the case, I have two possible ideas, based on the beeb-em, BBC micro emulator. 1, to have another, either console or an edit box, window that displays the text output by dos and text-mode programs, possibly with the system cursor tracking the dos one. Second, we could have dos text sent to SAPI or similar, speech output systems on mac/linux/etc. Does this make sense? 😀
Keep up the good work of dosbox, and may c:\> live on!

Reply 1 of 8, by wd

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I'm guessing text output in text modes of dos are just sent to sdl, and printed?

text access can happen as random access to the emulated video memory, so any redirection idea won't work.

Reply 2 of 8, by arfy

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ah, I was under the impression that dos had a purily text mode? On my real dos system, that i had back in 2000, the screen reading program I was using, jaws for dos, would tell you if the system went into a graphical mode. I don't have the necessary hardware, else I'd be testing if enough of a dos system's emulated to run jaws. Would certainly be interesting in any case.

Reply 3 of 8, by wd

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that dos had a purily text mode?

Yes but you can write a character at position (0;0) and the next character
at position (10;20),
and "write" means a simple memory write.

Reply 4 of 8, by arfy

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success! Just writing to report that I had a friend with the necessary hardware (serial speech synthesizer) and screen reading software test things out. And, amazing, it worked. 😀
The only slight hickup seemed to be at first it wasn't reading screen output automatically, however, this was fixed after going into, and coming out of a mod editor. Hoping to do my own testing soon, since that glitch could have been anything from a bug in emulation to having the reader in the wrong mode.

Reply 5 of 8, by robertmo

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And all adventure games will have voice in DOSBox now. No need for remakes. 😉

Reply 6 of 8, by arfy

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robertmo wrote:

And all adventure games will have voice in DOSBox now. No need for remakes. 😉

Not directly they won't. you'll still need your old dos screen reader and serial synth. just like the real thing. 😀. Wonder if someone could right a synth emulator that goes on to a sapi synth. You'd direct the screen reader to something like com3, where it would find an emulated, hardware synth. speech past to it then goes to sapi. wonder if that'll ever happen? 🤣

Reply 7 of 8, by autoexecdotbat

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anyone heard of the talking dosbox that is on audiogames.net?

to win the game you must defeat coppa!
http://chng.it/DNc2L8LvLJ