Hello, this is my first post. I'm glad that this community exists and I hope to share all my DOS love with you all.
I'm trying to get TextAssist to work under DosBox (W311) but it doesn't. Each time I run it, it says "unable to open driver" The sound is working under Win 311, since I can listen to midi files or play wav sounds.
What am I missing? Please help me to get my computer speaking and singing 😀
Best!
Maybe I remember this wrongly, but isn't TextAssist some Creative Labs stuff that requires very special hardware that's only found on real Soundblaster cards? Hardware that no sane non-Creative program ever used because Creative had shitty licensing policies and pretty much required signing away your life to them if you wanted to get the documentation? Or was it that the only way you could access it was through horribly buggy DLLs? Something like that, I believe.
I doubt DOSBox emulates those DSP chips for example, that existed on some Creative SB16 variants.
tearex
Yes, i think this program needs some special DSP chip on the Sound Blaster card.
However, I've tried it into my real AWE32 and it doesn't work either, but as far as I can remember, I had this working when I was a kid, with a SB16 (value?)
There was a computer band called 386DX which used this software for the lyrics IIRC.
Best!
You could (try to) check if it uses some ASP commands.
TextAssist relies on that Willowpond TTS engine doesn't it? I know some related software works, and sometimes the TTS engine itself makes a runaway loop and fails strangely
so my guess? it's a bugged installation. though I have not attempted to try TextAssist and the rest of the SB16 suite in Win 3.1, but I highly doubt it's the reason "special hardware" needed for the Willowpond software TTS engine.
I've tried to install the same driver set (found here on vogons drivers) into a real 486 with AWE32 (2 different cards) with the same issues. "Unable to open driver"
The drivers are SB16AWE_Compilation_by_TheMAN_rev4.1. Seems there is no luck for me 🙁
