Hi Again,
This is NOT correct. There were 3 screen reading programs written for
the c-64! I don't even remember the name of the first program I used,,
but it worked off of a cartridge that you plugged into the cartridge
slot and produced a software synthesized voice. That one didn't work
very well--it only ran a few programs. Then there was Eric Bohlmann's
product, that had a screen reader that you had to load in with a load
command from a disk. Once it was loaded, you would remove the disk and
proceed normally. It came with a keypad and a synthesizer. Then you
would insert whatever disks you wanted and load the programs. I would
guess that it worked with about 60% of the commercial software
available. Then Eric made a cartridge version that worked on about 80%
of the commercially available software which was really amazing for that
time. He also had written a terminal program that used a whopping 40K.
Also, I wrote my first C code on a very optimizing K&R C compiler. The
only problem was that it took about 15 minutes and 5 disk removals to
compile a simple program. The reason I got a PC was so that I could
compile C programs faster and the fact that all of the C books at that
time were either using UNIX examples or DOS examples.
Jim Wantz WB0TFK
On Thu, 23 May 2002,
Toby Fisher wrote:
> On Wed, 22 May 2002, Alex Snow wrote:
>
> > Yeah lots of it was in rom, but not enough to boot without a disk with
> > software on it. Thats why there wasn't any screen reader for those
> > machines, just talking programs.
>
> That's right, there was a speech synth that you plugged into a socket at
> the back, I still have one at my parents' place. You could write your own
> programs to talk under the C64, but to make them speak, you had to put
> slashes everywhere, and other stuff to get the pauses right and stuff,
> very weird.
>
> Cheers.
>
>
