There were pc-speaker sound drivers for Linux, but the cpu overhead was awful. To run the speaker you need to use one of the timers on the 8259 and there is no ability to use interrupts or dma so you must sit in busy wait loops to get the timing correct. You need to convert pcm to pwm and feed it to the speaker and we don't even have a free software speech engine for Linux yet that is of good enough quality and stability and responsiveness for the applicaiton we want. Let's be realistic, most modern boards have soundcards on them, and something half decent can be had for $10US so gone are the days of pc-speaker and parallel port dongles for sound. Most modern laptops even have soundcars in them. The lack of sound drivers at boot isn't hte problem for speakup, it is that a tts engine takes up a hell of a lot of kernel memory which then isn't swapable. On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 05:04:04PM -0400, Alex Snow wrote: > Hi All, > I was just thinking: Would it be possible to right drivers to use the pc > speaker as a synth in speakup? Then for those who don't have a hardware > synth that would work. > ----- Original Message ----- -- Kerry Hoath: kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or kerry at gotss.spice.net.au ICQ: 8226547 msn: kerry at gotss.net Yahoo: kerryhoath at yahoo.com.au
