I do still have the A4. I can't make it sing, but I know how to operate the music composer. Sadly I have the A4 standard. I wish I had the Pro, since that apparently had a Yamaha FM sythesizer. That would have been really cool to have. If you can give me a link to the song you want me to do, I can try to make it with the music composer and record it with a patch cable.

The talker mode would work perfectly, but I don't actually know what character I have to send to it to make the speech stop. This means that I could theoretically hook it up to a computer and use it with a screenreader, but I wouldn't be able to interrupt the speech, which would suck. One of these days I'll get around to trying all the basic Ascii set when I'm bored. Most synthesizers used a control-x character, the KNG used a Control-C, the Sonobraille used... something weird that I can't remember, but the A4 doesn't respond to them. Does anyone know of any vintage screenreader that supported the Eureka? I could capture what it sends with the BNS and figure it out that way.

Great. As soon as I have a good recording software and a decent mic, I'll let you know; the macbook's builtin mic doesn't sound very professional, and I don't know anything about using Garage Band.

high,
@guilevi, did you look at the link in the last post?
as for old bns programs on other systems, porting between the bns and other old computers should be easy, since bns appears to run on a clone of gwbasic. Most bns programs, like the ones made by bpc programs, will run under ms-dos as is. a few apple 2 programs were also successfully ported to the bns, I saw an archive of old bns software that happened to have a port of origon trail on it.

The only BNS or Braille I had access to was the one that the tennessee school for the blind had. I think you can make the BNS sing, but that is a big if. The only way I can think of doing is via basic and the major draw back there was that  had to be under 61000 lines of code. I don't remember the exact number though. You will also need to remember the basic commands that control the synth in the BNS. Add to that, the synth wasn't all that great anyway. LOL. I think I still have the basic programming guide for the braille lite and BNS lining about on  hard drive somewhere. Don't remember where though. I did not know that most of the programs for the BNS could run on DOS. Then again, I remember looking into the basic programming stuff at some point and seeing that .BAS source code would run on other systems with vary little change. This is going back to the good old days. If anyone is wondering, yes I can still read the old basic source files for the BNS platform. I might be able to through one together if I wanted. Now I wonder where I did put those files.... I guess I have to weight until I get back to my desktop computer. That should be by the end of this week. Oh yes, don't tell me that someone has a old BNS around that is still in working condition. If they do, they might want to make a recording of one so that thenewer people around know how they sound. Yes, they really do sound bad compare to today's synths. Yes, the double talk, or was that the doublespeak synth that sounds better. Anyway, the first bookport really did sound better than the BNS. Does anyone remembers those devices? LOL. I guess I am straying to far off of this topic. LOL.

it was on braillesoft's website. I'd give you a link but I heard a roomer that the site went down and I don't want to take chances and give you a dead link.

I once had a rare version of the bns that had doubletalk. I got it from my computer teacher at perkins school for the blind. I also had access to one of the votrax based versions there.

the talking dosbox includes this archive.

by the way, I know for certain that the bns could sing, because jeff redousky got it to sing twinkle twinkle little star, and i almost included that version on the tts preschool album, but that was when I was following a "1 recording per song" rule, that I quickly lifted as soon as cae jones did his eloquence songs.
speaking of which, could anyone get the bns to sing there are 7 days? I'm still awaiting the eureka a4 backing track.

thanks, could you do a bns version of there are 7 days when you get the chance?

OH, I'd also be interested in a doubletalk version of that song as well, possibly with the tone generator providing a backing track. I know doubletalk can sing because patrick perdue got it to sing a gateway vs aptiva parody of daisy bell (a.k.a the song of hal 9000's funeral).
I did mannage to find a youtube video of the eureka a4 in action, mostly demonstrating the word processor, and a cd by the NFB containing related files has also been archived on the internet.

Hi,
I haven't had a chance to set up the Eureka in a while, but yesterday I finally got it booted again. I have been recording the various system sounds and sampling it's music  synthesizer, and sometime this weekend I will make that song for you.
Does anyone know of any screenreader that supported the A4's talker mode?

I would be interested in the system sounds as well.