For anybody who has the Dectalk PC 2 rather than the original Dectalk PC,
I want to post what I had to do to get it working, and point out a slight
bug in Speakup. First, I re-built my kernel with all of Speakup as
modules. Next, I downloaded the dec_pc.tar.gz file from the Speakup FTP
sight and unpacked it in /usr/local/lib/dec_pc. Next, I modified the
dec_pc.conf file, changing the top line to "io=0x260" which reflects the
setting of my Dectalk PC. After attempts to load the Dectalk drivers
resulted in no speech, I decided to copy the drivers that I already have
for my Dectalk PC2 in place of the supplied drivers. Thus, I replaced the
following files with my versions. kernel.sys, lts.exe, ph.exe, and
cmd.exe. Lastly, I copied the file dtpcdic.dic and renamed it to
dtpc.dic. this replaced the dtpc.dic supplied with the archive. After
all that, I could successfully run the command "dtload -t" and type text
and have it echoed back. However, when I tried to load the Speakup
module, I got errors to the effect that Speakup couldn't find the Dectalk
PC. It turns out that Speakup doesn't recognize 0x260 as a valid address
for the Dectalk PC. The solution is to modify line 30 of speakup_decpc.c
to add 0x260 to the list of base addresses and re-build the kernel and
modules. Actually, you may be able to get away with just re-building the
modules, but I went ahead and rebuilt the kernel as well to be safe. The
new line 30 looks like this.
static int synth_portlist[] = { 0x340, 0x350, 0x240, 0x250, 0x260, 0 };
Now, my Dectalk PC works! The only gripe I have is that words with
apostrophes aren't pronounced correctly. It's treating apostrophes as
spaces, so that "it's" gets spoken as "it s." Also, there is no pause
between sentences. The sluggishness mentioned in the Readme isn't as bad
as I was expecting from reading list archives. Anyway, thanks to all
those who have helped in supporting various synthesizers in Speakup and
especially those who are working on making software synthesizers work.
While I personally prefer hardware synthesizers, having the option of
using software synthesizers will open Speakup to a lot more users, and
thus, Linux in turn.
