Ethan Dicks <erd_6502(a)yahoo.com> wrote: The original poster was describing an intended use for these to enable use of a speech-synthesis card on what I'm guessing is a more modern PC with a sound card, as a backup for when the sound card or its drivers fail. I guess what I'm wondering is, how is this supposed to work with shiny new PCs that have no ISA slots, and is that what the poster is really after? Probably completely off topic though. As long as I'm off the rails, some other ramblings: A blind former ex-cow-orker used to use Artic speech synthesizers to work her computers. I remember her having both an ISA card and an external box about the size of a paperback book (maybe a bit thinner and longer) which attached to the PC via a serial port, and later another smaller Artic external box (about half the size of the older one). These were something of a nuisance due to copy protection -- it wasn't enough to require the speech synthesizer hardware, the Artic software was keyed to the specific speech synthesizer. Later (I'm thinking 1997 or 1998) she switched to using a software package called JAWS from Henter-Joyce. This could either use the Artic synthesizer or the Windows audio drivers (she was running NT 4.0 on her notebook PC). She liked the voice of the Artic box (because she'd been using it for years and had got used to it), but rapidly got used to the software speech-synthesizer code because it meant one or two less things to have to carry around. JAWS was also copy protected, with a key diskette that allowed some small number of installations to hard disks -- you could also de-install and increment the counter on the key disk in order to move the installation, but of course if the hard disk got whacked then you might not have the opportunity to do this. -Frank McConnell