YouTube: Amiga as Workstation in 1986

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by aeberbach

Thom I am loving these videos, remembering the time I first sat in front of a 1-floppy 512K A1000 and tried to make a compiler work. Keep it up!

@hammer, just try to enjoy the videos...

+1

[peo]

Hi Thom,

Just found your really interesting series on historical use of the Amiga 1000 for development (and as imposed, other serious use later on). If not allowed to share the ADFs you are using in the series (none of which is available for purchase), can you at least provide some hints (md5 / tosec reference) for each part of the series what files (floppys / adfs and documentation) were used, so we curious people can follow along if we want ?

For "Part 0", the extra demo disk(s) are also interesting stuff (I probably already have these "somewhere").

The C guide was quite easy to find (it's on RCEU and other places): "Amiga C Compiler Users Reference Guide", with md5 CC00E0AFC3CAD3E23B86E3DF6009E4FC

I probably found the old Lattice C floppy you used, or an older one (1.0) without the make-c-cli script that deletes stuff from the copy of the workbench floppy.

As for Workbench/AmigaOS 1.0 or 1.1, and the narrator.device and speak-handler,you mention that Cloanto didn't include them on their disks (might or might not be so now), but when I recently installed AmigaOS 1.3 on one of my A2000s, these files were included (I'm sure it was the Cloanto version, as the startup-sequence had some modifications by them).

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by tschak909

While AmigaDOS from the beginning could attach block devices from external code, there was no mount utility, so there were external programs which called exec and dos.library to present the device to the system. Mount would be added in 1.2, as would BindDrivers, the expansion library, etc, to make this easier.

The problem was actually one level earlier because there was no way to let kickstart call into code that could actually perform the mount. There is no call in exec or dos to mount something, it requires to build the data structures and add them to the doslist yourself. That became a call to expansion.library (actually) in 1.2, and to dos.library (finally) in 2.0.



Coming back to what I said, there was no boot mechanism that would execute custom code that could perform such steps, unless you somehow intercepted access to the kickstart WOM and fiddled your code in there, depending on some implementation details of the WOM. All of this arrived with autoconf in 1.2 (though romboot did not work before 1.3).
All of this had to happen as part of the startup-sequence and required access to a floppy. That's what why I'm asking...

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by peo

As for Workbench/AmigaOS 1.0 or 1.1, and the narrator.device and speak-handler,you mention that Cloanto didn't include them on their disks (might or might not be so now), but when I recently installed AmigaOS 1.3 on one of my A2000s, these files were included (I'm sure it was the Cloanto version, as the startup-sequence had some modifications by them).

The issue is that the narrator and the translator are IPs of Softvoice, and the company still exists and wants to get paid for distributing their software. Yes, I asked them for including software in 3.1.4, and the answer was "$$$ or else", and therefore, it did not happen. Thus, I have some doubts on what Cloanto is doing here...

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

The issue is that the narrator and the translator are IPs of Softvoice, and the company still exists and wants to get paid for distributing their software. Yes, I asked them for including software in 3.1.4, and the answer was "$$$ or else", and therefore, it did not happen.

Isn't feasible to replace Softvoice software with some open source alternative?

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Isn't feasible to replace Softvoice software with some open source alternative?

Probably, but I guess you run into several problems: modern TTS codebases might not perform acceptably on a 68000 and also ensuring that you can parse the old phonemes correctly and generate something that is intelligable as the same thing is also not so simple perhaps.


I think this conversation came up before.


And all of this is compounded by how much development effort vs return this is especially once the 5 people who really want and will use such a 'back-port' could just copy narrator.device from their old floppies/whatever.

[peo]

https://www.text2speech.com/
Looks like a web page from the early 90's and their examples sounds like the AmigaOS narrator from the mid 80's..
"To date, there are over 8 million copies of the SoftVoice text-to-speech system in use world-wide, making SoftVoice, Inc. one of the largest providers of text-to-speech in the world.", so there is 8 million Amigas running WB 1.3 or 2.04

Really odd that they are so eager to hold on to their distribution rights for the software that hasn't been updated in more than 35 years.
It was impressive back then, but not that impressive 35 years later..

Anyone who have 1.3 or 2.04 have the needed files on their original disks (or on the ADFs provided by Cloanto).