First, there has been no change on my residency status.
Recently, a friend of mine sent me a link to an emulator for the Texas Instruments 99/4A computer. I don’t think he realized I used to program on that machine. I was quite enthused. The emulator has rudimentary screen reader support. It has problems but it works well enough, considering I never had screen reader support way back then. I used to make the thing talk with the use of a cartridge called Terminal Emulator 2, and I also had an Extended BASIC cart, but the speech was much easier to use when the Terminal Emulator cart was inserted. With that, I could just open a file to it’s speech device and send stuff to it, including listing a program to it using the list"speech" command. One had to have an extra module plugged into the side of the machine, which I also had, all those goodies thanks to a company, now defunct, called Triton Electronics.
The emulator comes with some cartridges, so I can have basically the same setup as I did back then. The Extended BASIC cartridge lacks some modifications Triton must have included in the cart I had back then, but all in all, a nostalgic experience. I’m not confident enough to save programs yet, so I haven’t done much, just enough to know I still remember a lot about programming on that old machine.
I never had a disk system back then, so I’m only really familiar with saving programs on tape, something I don’t have the hardware to do now, neither a cassette recorder/player nor the cable with the proper plugs. I wouldn’t even know where to buy such an interface, one that would fit on this much-newer Lenovo laptop.
Still, I wonder how the programmers got that old speech synthesizer to work. When I print things to it, or list a program, it sounds just like that old synthesizer module I had back then.
Well, anyway, I’m enjoying this nostalgic journey back into my past.
Haha 🙂
Hmm, never made that connection, to DECtalk that is. They had a strange idea about making the voice drop. It would raise slowly if a question mark was at the end of a sentence. It always sounded like it was depressed to me, lol.
Thanks, listened to them both. And they do sound significantly different. Don’t know why but this reminded me of different versions of DecTalk, each with their own timbre.
I’ll try and make a recording of it soon. Maybe I’ll do both the Terminal Emulator speech and the Extended BASIC. They sound significantly different that it might be entertaining.
I would love to hear it.