[jenorton]

Hi folks:

Please forgive if I am posting this in the wrong place.

I am new to 99er.net, but, wanted to introduce myself and get a little information.

My name is Joseph Norton, from Dalton, GA.

I am a blind computer user.

I bought the TI from a friend of mine, since it had a speech synthesizer, and, was interested in what it could do.

This was back in 1984.  I had a lot of fun, eventually invested in the expansion box, disk systems and bought a separate hardware synthesizer.

As the years went by, I had a lot of fun, writing little programs for myself in both TI Basic and Extended Basic, routing most all of my Print statements through "rs232.ba=9600) to go to my Echo speech synthesizer.  I did have a Terminal Emulator II, but, if I wanted speech output in anything other than TI basic, I had to get a hardware synthesizer.

Anyway, years have gone by, My TI quit working one day, but, I had mostly moved on.

Now, I see there are still some folks still using their TI 99's.

Recently, I have been playing around with virtual machines, and, it occurred to me to look for a TI Emulator, as I had once had one working under MAME, I think.

On this very site, I found 2 that I find very interesting.

First, I ran across the Classic 99 emulator.

I found it interesting, because I could run it, go into the TI 99/4A emulation, but, I could print things out to a file, which would be saved on my PC's HD, then, I could view my results with my Windows screen-reader.

However, I noticed that neither of the things I tried could run the text-to-speech functions utilized by the Terminal Emulator II.

I happened to see the Win994A emulator.  It had a lot more of cartridges and disks in a couple zip packages I could use, and, amazingly, text-to-speech works!  The sound doesn't seem as true-to-life, and, the speech is still not quite as good as the real thing, but, I get to play with it again!

I am even looking to try a few educational titles on my 4-year-old and 10-year-old to see what happens.

Anyway, can any of you out there give me some pointers.  For example, does either of these emulators look similar to the original TI 99/4A?  One thing I found interesting, is that, in Classic99, I can change the system to an old TI 99/4--not that I would want to, but, it was fun to look at it, since I'd never experienced it before.

Anyway, I would be interested in hearing about the pros and cons of these and other emulators, as well as any programs I might find useful as a speech user.

This is bringing back a lot of memories.  After all, the TI 99/4A was my first computer I did anything with.

Thanks for any suggestions..