Category: Geeks r Us
hello everyone,
So, I... admit. I am one of the 2 who purchased a Speaqualizer system. It cost $18, figured why not? (by the way, the last one is still available, so someone snatch it up!)
I'm wondering how I can make use of this ISA card. Could I somehow pick up an old system? I'm willing to budget $80 into this venture, but need a computer old enough to handle this card. From what I hear--it's one of the only, if not the only speech hardware synthesizer which can read a computer's bios and start-up routines. I find that fascinating and wonder how hard it would be to get this to work.
Please, if you have amy information, let me know! I will record a demo of the Speaqualizer for all to hear.
All the best,
Tomi
Tiffanitsa will buy the other one and rave about how it's better than anything else.
What I don't know:
I think there's an external keypad you will need in order to make the thing work. I only heard about it once in the mid-nineties, long after it'd been obsolete.
Now what I do know:
It is an EISA card so you need something like a Pentium I board, with Socket 7 parts I believe, the old Pentium I 133 is probably the newest you can use it on.
It was used on old 8088 and 8086 machines, the old XT and AT computers. If you can find any of those lying around whose CMOS batteries still work good luck. Plus hopefully you can find the external speaker or whatever it is you'll need for it.
I don't know how they work, if as a hardware-based solution it intercepts as video or what. Apparently it never took off: it was defunct by the mid 1990s when I heard about it as a passing blip on the radar from the 1980s.
Good luck.
Actually, I've heard that it can read alot more than many screen readers of the time. It really does sound like an amazing concept and I'd be interested in learning whether or not it could handle some of the newer DOS programs better than the readers, since it basically just reads what's on the screen. That said, I wonder how it actually differs from a traditional screen reader? In any case, here's what I found from
"http://www.abledata.com/abledata.cfm?pageid=19327&ksectionid=19327&top=11181&productid=94031&trail=0&discontinued=0
"Speaqualizer is a hardware-based system that provides voice output of information appearing on the computer screen of IBM PC or PS/2 Model 30/286 computers. The Speaqualizer is "transparent," providing voice output for any software that sends character data to the screen and uses the operating system cursor. The Speaqualizer system consists of three parts: an internal circuit card for the computer, a control box, and a connecting cable. A keyboard on the control box is used to control what section of the screen will be read back and how it will be read. The user can adjust the speed and volume of the synthesized speech at any time, even while the Speaqualizer is talking. The user can also silence the speech at any time. The user can opt to hear each character read back as it is typed on the computer's keyboard. Upper case letters are signalled by a higher pitch of the voice. The Speaqualizer can review text displayed in columns. Because it is hardware-based, the Speaqualizer does not consume any of the computer's memory while in operation. COMPATIBILITY: For use on IBM PS/2 Models 25/30 and IBM PC computers. POWER: 120-volt"
I also learned that it was originally developed by the NFB and that a man named Rami Rabby was the one who named it. The same article mentioned it's superiority over other screenreaders.
http://www.nfbnet.org/files/nfb_literature/TECHNLGY.TXT
It's a very short paragraph and I've pretty much summarised it. The user's manual is on Amazon but it doesn't give a description etc. and there's a bunch of html or something at the bottom of the page.
http://www.amazon.com/Speaqualizer-Users-Manual-ROM-Revision/dp/B00072FGGO
I've even seen Linux mentioned in reference to the Speaqualizer, though I didn't read the pages in question. So it seems to be platform independent. Anyway, if anyone has more information on this device, please post it.
I forgot to ask. Why can't it work on machines above a Pentium I? If I have a custom machine made with a speed greater than 133mhz and an isa slot, can I use it on there?
I thought Pentium I boards were the last to have the Eisa slots. Could be wrong. But the slots will come with the board. You can't add an EISA slot to a board that doesn't have it.
Ooh, shit! I didn't know that... So I guess I really do have to choose between isa and pci. Thanks for telling me. What other things, in general, can't be added to boards?
ok, couple of things here. Thanks Eleni for those articles.
LeoGuardian, also thanks for the info you gave.
The reason it cannot work on newer boards is because of something to do with timings. I pulled that off a mailing-list of some sorts-I guess the board could not handle systems with newer CPUs, and I actually want to find out the highest clock speed it'll work on.
LeoGuardian, Pentium I wasn't the last to have an ISA slot. If you ebay "isa old computer" or something of the sorts you will see that there are machines with a 400 MHz processor still containing 1 or 2 ISA slots. I'm not sure though if the card is ISA v1 or v2.
The unit did come with the keypad you speak of, which is good. I basically have all 3 parts here.
Yes, if Eleni wants to buy it she's more than welcome to, however the bid ends on the 7th and as of last night the last unit was still not sold. Not sure bout today, head over to blindbargains.com and search speech with insert+f to find the ebay listing.
It's a nice product but is it worth investing a penny into seeing how it works and then throwing the machine out? What I'm saying is, while the speaqualizer-by all intensive purposes-is a product of genius creation, it's use in today's world wouldn't go beyond running Dos. I read the instructions manual yesterday and it said that programs which create their own cursor cannot be used with the system (aka. graphical games). This means that the program can only intercept what the system down at the hardware level sees. If this thing could work on a machine running Windows 95 even, using Windows with it I'd imagine would be impossible since Windows creates it's own system carret. Please someone correct me on this though if I'm wrong.
With that said, I'd love to see this in action, but with $150 in the bank this month, not sure how feezable it'd be to buy a machine for this. (I know, I over-shopped this Christmas for family/friends). Winter break is coming in 2 weeks and this would be a great time to spend on geeky tinkering, which is why I'd have the most time now to go back and step into the 1990s.
But again my rational mind is that today's world is a connected one. If I got an old computer which could support the system I'd want to perform at least e-mailing on the thing, since Facebook/youtube are out of the question for a computer of that speed. This really highlights the differences we have between now and the 80s/90s: Our world has become so meshed into the web that imagining a system or device that cannot do the basic of all basic internet is impossible. I'm not sure if I should take this as good or bad;For the days where you could sit down at your computer simply to read a book or to enjoy yourself in front of a nice card game of spades is gone. Computers have become a lot more. And while I miss those days a lot I don't really know if spending anything below $100 is worth it for a piece of computer which I would only use for 2-4 days. You get my reasoning, right?
Wish I could use ISA cards in vmware. I saw a USB to ISA converter (or, sorry, ISA to USB) but this gadget costs around $150. Seeing that the timings on the card are calculated by CPU frequency and that it cannot be used on or after a certain frequency, I don't think spending that kind of doe would be worth it.
I need everyone's thoughts though and as much as can be gathered from this device.
notes and info:
from http://www.mail-archive.com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/msg12114.html.:
"...This was a 8 bit device and worked with a PC XT. The sound quality of this
device wasn't all that great but one got used to it.
With the help of the accompanying manual and a very dedicated trainer from
our I T Department, I learnt Word Star, dBASE3 and Lotus 1 2 3."
8-bit device. No wonder it didn't sell too well. This means AM quality for the audio. Ouch.
from: http://braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2003-December/023384.html
"...
As I recall, the Speaqualizer plugged into a standard ISA slot, and
copied video signals from the ISA bus. I believe a little, external
control box was used for reviewing the screen and such. I was told
that its weakest point was its not-so-great speech quality. I never
owned one myself, but it was high on my wish list for a while. It
seemed like a good idea, and I am surprised it did not catch on more
than it did."
There is no reason why you couldn't go on the internet with DOS. There are pages for this and all sorts of software out there for just about everything. But even if alot of it proved inaccessible, you could definitely check your e-mail and probably read the newspaper. I know a woman who only uses DOS and I met her via the Blind-L list, so she's clearly using e-mail and the world wide web. I wonder if she knows about this? Hmm, must ask. Sad that the speech quality isn't that good but yeah. I'm torn as well, because, at the moment, I don't have a computer available with an isa slot but this sounds really nice, especially if it can get around things that readers find troublesome. The thing is that it probably won't come around again for ages! You know how difficult it is to find tech like this.
I actually just thought of an extremely important and wonderful use for the Speaqualizer but am not sure if it could do it. Suppose that I have a machine with no operating system on it and I then put in my DOS floppies or cd. Will Speaqualizer actually read the installation instructions as they appear on screen or does it require an operation system to be installed with drivers? My guess is, if it can read the bios, that it can also read something like this. If so, then perhaps it's time that something like this is seriously discussed, even for modern platforms, as we still can't install Windows on our own without help. Yes, there's the unattended kit but we'd still have to have the os on the machine to create it. Anyway, this would be truly incredible because I could then install DOS without having to wait for someone sighted to do it!
It would probably read an install just fine. Most software had a soft cursor for oh so many reasons. Well most modern software in the early nineties. You're right Windows 3.1 or 95 wouldn't handle it because there is no "hard" and "soft" cursor. Everything in Windows is handled via windows messages - communications that go back and forth between programs - which despite all the GPFs that used to happen, were better than the hard crashes a soft cursor could cause in DOS if something got out of range.
Now I'm fascinated. I've never heard of this, of hard or soft cursors or Windows messages. So I'll need to look this up. Do I need to worry about hard and soft cursors when I'm programming? And now I really! want that Speaqualizer! If it will let me install the entire os without a screenreader, it's a must have! I just need to check to insure that all the parts are being sold in the auction and that they still work.
Theoretically, could a program be created that could read the soft cursor like the Spequalizer? If so, can it fit on a floppy or cd rom? Can it be made so that the computer boots from it before installing DOS so that it could read what's on the screen as the os is being installed via a regular hardware synthesizer?
I just thought of something and I hope that I'm wrong. Doesn't a driver require a path and wouldn't that require an os? Then again, people have used synthesizers which were traditionally made for DOS and Windows with Linux, which has no drives etc. Hmm. Perhaps, this is still possible?
Perhaps, all that's needed is a program that would print characters to the serial port! There may be certain synthesizers with advanced processors which are capable of interpreting and reading this information but I'm not sure. Sorry for high jacking this thread, but as I said, this Speaqualizer sounds like a unique and wonderful idea and it would be great if it could be duplicated somehow, whether through hardware or software. But since hardware is most likely out of everyone's price range, software would be the better choice.
For the record, I have some socket 462 motherboards with isa slots which after a bios flash can take athlons, but if it does depend on the clock speed then it's really not worth it.
If you want pre windows / bios access and your willing to pay for it, get a pc weazzel.
Very interesting! Is this the one you mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Weasel_2000
But how would this relate to speech? I would hook it up to the serial port or put in a pci slot and then what? I'm a bit confused.
I know that some motherboards that went into windows 98 machines had pci slots. I never used them, but they were there.