Wow, I'm glad you made a thread about this. I'm wondering if it might be possible to get a speak and spell anywhere, I'd love one of those, or if you might be able to get one ourself just for the fun of it.

On the other hand, it was a kid's learning toy, so kids of that day probably weren't used to the QWERTY keyboard at that age. I know I wasn't. I learned how to type at age eight or nine, and I got a Speak 'n Spell at age six or seven.

Regarding Apple II computers, I assume you know of the project I created which people call Mess Apple? It uses the Mess emulator to emulate the Apple IIe hardware, including the Echo speech synthesizer. If you have no experience with the Apple, this would be a good starting point to get your feet wet.

Hi.
gilevy.
Wow another guy after my own cpu.
I used to like old tech in the day.
I actually have an old keynote gold 386 t1850 here but its broken the backs a bit smashed the hard drive is dead, the floppy drive is dead and the battery after it being dropped may be unstable.
I did use to enjoy it.
I think but don't quote me on that a site winworldpc.com may have a few old oses and drives not all of them have downloads but I think there is cpm in all its glory windows and dos in all its glory drivers, information etc.
If you brouse the library of archives there should be files I havn't checked it out fully.
I havn't hit much but if you go to wolfenstein3d.com there are archives of a lot of old retros and music sfx etc to.
Music for the c64 is at hvsc.de
in no big order, pub.keygenmusic.org, amegaremix.com, iimusic.net
ubiktune.org
to have a few
brainstorm.untergrund.net.
I can't quote all the artests, but a lot of them have  bandcamp pages.
maxo, disasterpiece, chibitech phlostistan I think to name a few.
There is a lot of chip based music round and a lot still being made.
modland and modarchive and a project called hornet though thats a lot of doodling through has a lot of old music on those.
THe rest I am not sure.
I experienced dos 320 where you had to type sit to shut down the system.
My earliest experiences were a dos 5.0 toshiba unit.
I upgraded this to 6.22, then modified it with quemm and a few other things, norton and random utilities.
Later on from 1998-2000 I actually formed a relationship with a friend at highschool that way.
Sadly while the unit was really good to game its work potential lagged off and I had to get another unit for that.
Sadly from time to time that newer one broke and I had to use the older unit.
After I hit windows though a single tasked os just didn't cut it the system was getting old but I had it till 2005 when it finally did die and used it as a good old text gamer.
Now if I could only find a keynote gold either external synth or an old keynote gold unit that fully worked I do actually have the disks 6.22, dos 5, wordperfect, a lot of game disks, quemm, norton 8 and I think at any rate old versions of keysoft 1 mastertouch 1 and 2 etc.
If I got the hardware I could start again.
I am not sure about the condition of the disks and I am not sure if I will be keeping those disks for much longer.
People have been saying I should chuck them and to be honest I think later this year when dad retires I will put a big pack of old computers, disks, etc and throw them out.
Saying that if you are happy to pay for shipping maybe I could post everything at you.
Its not like I will ever use those again!
Its sad I know but well thats the way it is.
Ofcause if you know where I can find some old working gear that would be fine.
The bad part is as far as I can find out the keynote gold stuff never worked over anything bar a 386 pc and they are almost impossible to get now.
I have dosbox I know and thats ok but the real deal is still something I would want.
I did try, like heck I did but its not like I can just pick one up now can I.
I did have an external but sadly I can't seem to pick up that old tech from local auction sites and mum is threatening me with full room eviction if I start storing junk in here pluss I have no space with all my external hdds, cds, backups and audio, and other bits of modern tech.
So I almost need someone that wants to trade for something and wants to trade for something of equal value.
Ofcause that person needs to be a retro like me, because most treat it as a pile of crap and I guess its now but I remember sitting reading or playing in the heat, imagining all sorts of things and daydreaming.
The problem with modern units, and not just win10 I mean every windows.
Is you can't you need to babysit the screenreader so its not as enjoyable as it once was.
Then windows itself while secure and nice and safe and happy to follow you where ever you go is not designed for old stuff especially if you try to get it to access hardware directly.
If you try to directly load your dectalk into dolphin sam you may realise what that means.
If not basically sam goes initialise dectalk.
Windows goes ok.
load drivers.
Windows goes, something is trying to connect to my system and its doing it incorrectly.
I have a problem.
I won't start.
Or I will start wierdly.
But if I don't start I need help.
I never got round the issue and after reformatting at least 10 times I had to admit defeat.
THe keynote golds ran a bit better but sadly with no serial ports hmmm.
I did at one stage think of buying a external usb synth but I am not sure what that would work or not.
Talking dosbox bypasses all that in a loopy sort of way by emulating a bns and piping it through espeak and a vertual com port.
This is the best solution however its not the same as what I had.
Another way is to pipe it through your sound card directly but you automatically loose all sound card functionality for that card.
I do suspect for us retros that the computers are just not suited to our gaming style either.
Not unless you get an old i3 or earlier and yes you can get one of those with ports for not much.
I'd be interested to hear demos of your collection.
I had a friend in a camp I went through who borrowed another's eurika with cpm took that and an old dos unit with dos5 and qbasic, wrote a transfer program for both in both basics.
After that he could control the unit, even play games on it he designed himself.
One day he was like I am bored, oh here is a laptop, oh this is a eurika, lets see if I can hack this thing in 10 minutes.
and he did.
Then lets see if I can run this game on it I have made in like a day or 2 and he did, happy days.
I was still in dos mode but sadly I didn't have any of my gear with me.
If there was a computer camp for the blind I think I would take it.

I was going to start something similar myself. I was going to get an accent SA, and maybe talk to my friend lisa about borrowing her doubletalk lt, which she has no use for since all her IRQs were taken by other components, especially her beloved sound blaster live! sound card.

Hi,
I will be starting a webpage with resources for people wo are interested in getting into this sort of stuff. I already have part of it written and all I have to do is figure out a name for the project and publish it. Of course this will include recordings of all of these devices.

Where were you planning to get an Accent SA from? Someone was about to sell me one but they stopped responding to my E-Mails a while ago and I can't get a hold of them anymore for some reason.

I was going to get mine off ebay. I was also thinking of building a retro computer running ms dos or windows 95 with an artic215, which was basicly an internal version of the votrax sc02 chip found on the braille n speak.

Ah the Eureka A4, I remember playing space invaders on that thing, although they called it aliens.

It was quite creative how they implemented the ships, using musical notes.

you'd have to match the correct notes before firing, for example you're at the far left, which use to be represented with the musical note C, and the ship happened to be at F sharp, so you'd have to find F sharp and shoot.

There was no panning back then so you had to be creative with your games.

Another game that was similar was missile.

The music composer was pretty cool as well, although my musical knowledge wasn't good enough to use it.

Cursoring to the note, then telling it what type of note, ETC.

I was told composing would take up to a few hours.

So yeah, things were certainly different back then.

I'd love to see if someone could make an emulator for the Eureka A4, or any of these old machines, so the games could be revived.

Even re-writing some of those games, the way it was intended to be played would be cool.

I'd definitely play Aliens again.

Yeah I know there are space invader type games out there, but they're not like Aliens.

Aliens didn't have an ending, you'd play until you got killed.

Of course, the game would just keep getting faster.

The Eureka A4 runs CP/M, doesn't it? I don't know much about that OS, except that it was the precursor to DOS.

It can sing, not sure how they did it though.

But I think it had a limited range.

I've only heard it do 2 octives.

if classic braillenote software could be made to run in an emulator and if you tell it to be a speech synth in the emulator then maybe pyserial and com0com could be used to bridge it and with an NVDA addon we could have keynote speech for NVDA or talking dosbox in windows7 win8 and win10 and maybe even keynote gold speech for NVDA. there are free windows ce emulators available just google search them you'll find them.

@blindncool, I'd be interested in them.
@cool_turk, would you be interested in getting the eureka a4 to sing there are 7 days?

As for old computers, the first computer I remember playing any kind of computer game on was an apple 2EE and now I am posting to this topic on an apple mac book pro fifteen inch. The times has changed a lot. Having my computer portend to be a braille or voice note would be interesting. Then again, maybe having my computer run those BNS and TNS programs that some of us remember would be interesting for old time sake.