[TUHS] v6 draws and speaks and now it's available to you

[Will Senn via TUHS]

Hi all,

I put up a repo on github with the full process of developing the 
endpoints along with a bunch or provenance and traces of the 
exploration. With a little bit of ingenuity and understanding and a lot 
of AI power directed at reverse engineering and grunt work, the result 
is a slight tweak to simh to provide the endpoints - one for graphics 
primitives over /dev/vt and the other for speech synthesis over /dev/vs. 
Neither is technically a device so much as an endpoint for the device 
byte streams interpretation (graphic commands needing to be displayed on 
a VT01 or speech commands - phonemes, inflections, etc needing to be 
"spoken" by a Votrax). OpenSIMH conveniently supplies two abstractions 
that make it painless - an XY plotting screen device and an SDL audio 
interface, both were leveraged in the work.

My main commitment was that v6 wouldn't know or care about the 
implementation, it would simply run mkconf and tweak low.s (cuz vs was 
very special), create special devices, build speak, plot, etc. just as 
would have been required with the original distribution.

Here's the summary announcement:

https://decuser.github.io/posts/v6-basic-with-graphics-and-speak/

And the repo:

https://github.com/decuser/v6vtvs