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

[Jay Logue via TUHS]

This is awesome, Will.  Thanks for putting this together.  Are there any 
plans to upstream changes to the OpenSIMH project?

The speech seems a little more chopped than other Votrax output I've 
heard (e.g. "two" sounds like "ooo").  Is that accurate for devices of 
this era?

Of course, glancing over the source tree, my mind immediately goes to 
"How can I port the back end to run on a UniBone and drive this from 
Mini-Unix on my 11/05?" :)

Then I remind myself I have too many projects already.

Jay

On 9/16/26 13:19, Will Senn via TUHS wrote:
> 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
>
>
>