The IBM PC used to have a way to access the BIOS using debug under MSDOS. You just typed in the memory address and the BIOS program came up and Using ASAP I was able to make any changes I needed. It was reading the same interface that my sighted friends were using. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marcel Oats" <moats@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Farhan" <i.am.Farhan at gmail.com>; "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 11:58 PM Subject: Re[2]: ancient speech synthesizers > Yes, they have it in their laptops, usually, not sure about the later > ones though. > > Marcel > At 10:43 PM 12/10/2006, you wrote: >>HI, i'm not sure if this applies to the current conversation here, >>but an interesting note. >>Toshiba makes a bios utility for windows you can read everything >>with in the bios, change the boot order and all that. I'm not sure >>how you could actually program one of those for LInux, but maybe you >>could contact Toshiba and talk to thems. >>On 10/12/2006 at 4:41 Gregory Nowak said >>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >>Hash: SHA1 >> >>On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 07:21:04PM +1300, Marcel Oats wrote: >> > The other think we could >> > think about, are why companies such as Asus have not made a piece >> of windows >> > software that is able to read the bios parameter block on their >> > boards, and allow the user to change them, in a nice accessible >> > interface. >> >>Why limit it to Asus, why not ask the same thing of all companies >>producing motherboards and bios code? Actually, I think that if AMI >>and Award were to include it in the base bios, the mb companies >>probably wouldn't pull it out. >> >>\as for the why, I'm willing to bet that it's because they don't care, >>because they think the RND would be too expensive, and probably >>because these companies think the market for something like this is >>too small. Granted, something like this wouldn't probably cost too >>much to develop. While we're discussing things to think about, if such >>a utility were developed, it would be nice to find it on the CD that >>comes with the mb, instead of having to pay for yet another program, >>because you have a disability, and most other people don't. Oh one >>more thing, let's not limit it to windows, arguably, I think such a >>utility would be easier to program as a gnu/linux text-based >>application, though since I haven't done hardware driver programming >>under gnu/linux, I could be wrong in my estimate of the difficulty level. >> >>Greg >> >> >> >>- -- >>web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org >>gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc >>skype: gregn1 >>(authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) >> >>- -- >>Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org >>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- >>Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) >> >>iD8DBQFFLeuP7s9z/XlyUyARAjVAAKCASW/PEucGdZpscORSn3OW9mTMiQCgtvJs >>IUjw10Vyr+pgVaPUAbQculk= >>=hfcK >>-----END PGP SIGNATURE----- >> >>_______________________________________________ >>Speakup mailing list >>Speakup at braille.uwo.ca >>http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>Speakup mailing list >>Speakup at braille.uwo.ca >>http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
