• Echo II speech card-need help

    From gatewaycityca@yahoo.com@21:1/5 to All on Wed Aug 18 19:23:59 2021
    Hi,
    I've had an Echo II speech synthesizer card installed in my Apple II+ for a while and until now it was working fine. It's been a while since I used it, and a couple of days ago I wanted to play around with it (make the computer say "Do you want to play a
    game?" like in the movie "Wargames", HA!). But when I tried to run the Textalker program on the disk, the computer keeps freezing up on the copyright screen. It doesn't respond to any keys or even the reset button. I have to turn off the computer and
    restart it.

    The disk is not an original that came with the card. I bought the card on eBay a couple of years ago and it came with a disk that looks like someone just copied at some point. But it was working fine until now. I also made a backup copy of the disk. The
    disk reads fine, but the card itself doesn't seem to be doing anything.

    I've opened the computer and cleaned it, and added cards, etc since I last used the Echo II. I was always very careful and I don't THINK I could have damaged it. All the other cards are working fine. Is it possible the ECHO II has to be in a specific
    slot to work? Or could it be having some kind of conflict with another card or something? I've tried moving it to a different slot but still can't get it to work. The card itself looks in perfect condition, no bad traces or contacts,etc.

    Here are the cards I have installed:
    Slot 0: Language Card
    Slot 1: Super Serial Card
    Slot 2: Grappler printer card (installed but not connects to a printer)
    Slot 3: "Wizard-80" 80 column card
    Slot 4: empty
    Slot 5: ECHO II card
    Slot 6: disk drive controller card

    I feel like I'm missing something. It seems like when I first got the card I had trouble getting it to work at first then too, but I don't remember.

    I'd greatly appreciate any help!
    -Chris

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  • From Jayson Smith@21:1/5 to gatewa...@yahoo.com on Tue Oct 5 15:24:19 2021
    Hi,

    Sorry for the long delay in replying, just saw this!

    The Echo doesn't need to be in a specific slot for Textalker to find it. Somewhere there's a list of the slots Textalker tries, in order. I know
    the first slot it looks in is slot 4, so you might try moving the Echo
    to slot 4 and see if that fixes it. BTW I'm blind, so I've used an Echo
    for my entire life of using Apple II computers.

    Jayson

    On 8/18/2021 10:23 PM, gatewa...@yahoo.com wrote:
    Hi,
    I've had an Echo II speech synthesizer card installed in my Apple II+ for a while and until now it was working fine. It's been a while since I used it, and a couple of days ago I wanted to play around with it (make the computer say "Do you want to play
    a game?" like in the movie "Wargames", HA!). But when I tried to run the Textalker program on the disk, the computer keeps freezing up on the copyright screen. It doesn't respond to any keys or even the reset button. I have to turn off the computer and
    restart it.

    The disk is not an original that came with the card. I bought the card on eBay a couple of years ago and it came with a disk that looks like someone just copied at some point. But it was working fine until now. I also made a backup copy of the disk.
    The disk reads fine, but the card itself doesn't seem to be doing anything.

    I've opened the computer and cleaned it, and added cards, etc since I last used the Echo II. I was always very careful and I don't THINK I could have damaged it. All the other cards are working fine. Is it possible the ECHO II has to be in a specific
    slot to work? Or could it be having some kind of conflict with another card or something? I've tried moving it to a different slot but still can't get it to work. The card itself looks in perfect condition, no bad traces or contacts,etc.

    Here are the cards I have installed:
    Slot 0: Language Card
    Slot 1: Super Serial Card
    Slot 2: Grappler printer card (installed but not connects to a printer)
    Slot 3: "Wizard-80" 80 column card
    Slot 4: empty
    Slot 5: ECHO II card
    Slot 6: disk drive controller card

    I feel like I'm missing something. It seems like when I first got the card I had trouble getting it to work at first then too, but I don't remember.

    I'd greatly appreciate any help!
    -Chris



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