V9T9 - the Next Generation?

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: I know you're probably been asked this many MANY times, but... : We seem to be the only active TI-994A people attempting to keep it alive via emulation. Ed Swartz left us his source code and his dumped TI roms before he was yelled at by TI and (probably) slapped with a : "cease-and-desist"... : The REAL only thing missing from the scene now is speech synthesis. PC99 does not have it, and if it did, I'd shell out the $100 or so to buy it. It IS a worthwhile purchase, for those who had such devices as MYARC hard drive thingys and stuff. I just had the basic TI-99/4A at that time, and hard drives were a thing of luxury. :) : For emulation on this system to press forward, first we really need to take Ed's code and make this program a Win95 program. The binary's a hard-to-setup DOS program, with command line switches and so on. We : really need to fix that (unless of course it HAS to be DOS mode for low level hardware interfacing). Also, what with DirectX video and DirectInput controllers and DirectSound (or any other sound implementation) it'd be a cinch for the user to setup, if these abilities were written into the code. Your frontend is useful - but up to a point. I bet we could gather together enough knowledgable people to revolutionize : Ed Swartz's code. : Next, Speech Synthesis: : Ed Swartz says that his code is basically ready for speech. He said in the Speech.txt readme that all that would be needed for HIM (note that he is no longer in the "scene") would be information on a certain compression format and the ROM from a certain chip in the speech synthesizer. I'd like more information from him on this, but he seems to have gone : underground. Of course, getting roms and utilizing them in this fashion is highly illegal. : PC99 claims that speech synthesizer capability would be impossible because the Sound Blaster DSP chip (or some other chip - I forget off the top of my head) would have to be reprogrammed. This is not what Ed says, and this conflict of information here is rather interesting. : I'm sure that many people check this messageboard occasionally for information of this sort. What V9T9 needs currently is for a group of programmers to get to work on it. I know that many experienced people come to this board, and I'd like to hear from them. : Do you think my ideas have merit? If so, contact me. : Yours in emulation, : Greg Ember : gsember@udel.edu

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