Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, archive.org has an .iso file. Someone posted an activation code for the program there. Windows 7 programs should run fine under Wine on Linux. So if anybody really wants to run this, it shouldn't be hard.

But listening to chanting from DECtalk? Here's "Happy Birthday" via DECtalk.[1]

There was apparently a 90s thing for religious DECtalk files. Here's an archive of them.[2] Here's "The Old Rugged Cross" in DECtalk input format.[3]

This mysterious program that represented so much work is probably mostly a DECtalk player and a big collection of playable religious DECtalk files. If someone were to extract the files, that would recover the content. There are players for DECtalk files; there's one at the links below. Converting them to a better text-to-speech system would help.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150310175636/http://theflameof...

[2] http://theflameofhope.co/SONGS%20FOR%20PC'.html

[3] http://theflameofhope.co/dectalk%20speak%20window/GOSPEL/OLD...

For anyone who doesn't know, DECtalk didn't always sound like that Happy Birthday song. Think more like Stephen Hawking.

I got to play with DECtalk around 1999, when it was already old, and IIRC required us dusting off an old SGI workstation that could run it in software.

We had a school homework assignment to hand-tune DECtalk encodings of famous lines of speeches by US statesmen, for dramatic delivery. "Essential liberty", "shall not perish from the earth!" etc. Prosody, stress, etc.

> This mysterious program that represented so much work is probably mostly a DECtalk player and a big collection of playable religious DECtalk files. If someone were to extract the files, that would recover the content.

The programmer who was doing the DECTalk work talked about this some:

> I ask Schnee if Buchler’s source code could be reconstructed from a copy of the software.

> Not exactly, she says. It might be possible to induce the machine code to dump out a database of every phoneme it had ever uttered — all the tiny pieces it had used to sing Armenian and Lithuanian and Egyptian trope — and then, if you were very patient and very skilled, you might be able to write code to piece them back together.

> It could be done, she says. But it wouldn’t be quick or easy. And it wouldn’t be the same program Buchler wrote.

There's also a sound file of their implementation at the bottom of the article.

That quote from Schnee seems odd to me. I mean, what do you get if you try to decompile the binary? That output should be more useful than "a database of every phoneme it had ever uttered".

And, as someone else pointed out in this thread, there exists an ISO and an activation code at archive.org, and it should be possible to get this running in Wine or in a VM. Someone clever could probably patch the binary to make it run on modern Windows. The distraught rabbis should community-source a developer.

All of that said, even if the source code were to be found, it seems likely that further development of the core functionality might be dead. This was a man's life's work in an esoteric domain; it might not exactly be accessible code.

I’m late to this thread but I actually cracked Trope Trainer open so I can help with the speculation. The interface to from Trope Trainer to the DECtalk DLL is just strings of ascii phoneme names and pitch and duration information. The code that generates those strings has simple parts and complicated parts. There’s an encoding of the Hebrew scripture, an XML file that describes the musical notes for different “tropes” (in several traditions), an INI file mapping Hebrew letters to DECtalk phonemes (in several dialects). Then there’s a fair bit of code that actually ties those together. The old version on archive.org is written in Delphi, newer versions written in Xojo (REALbasic). That compiled code has very gnarly hand-written logic for Hebrew pronunciation rules, and all the logic for choosing which trope to sing for which biblical verse. It’s daunting in there, but if more people than just me were interested in reverse-engineering it, I’m sure we could get it done.

I have several physical copies of the last edition of Trope Trainer, with serial numbers. They don’t work because they try to phone home for activation. I think they have all of the actual code they need to run, if would could bypass the initial steps. Realbasic binaries are harder to debug than Delphi, and I haven’t had time to really dig into it.

https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1505006493417938946

But didn't the article say that this software used a customized version of DECtalk with Hebrew phonemes and finer pitch control?

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