SpeakFreely 7.2
What is SpeakFreely? SpeakFreely is a voice-over-ip program, sometimes called an Internet Phone program. Comparable programs cost a lot of money and are not readily portable. SpeakFreely costs absolutely nada and is available on lots of computer platforms, such as Windows and most flavors of Unix.
You wrote this? Wow, you're god-like! No, I didn't. SpeakFreely was written by John Walker. He maintains the program sources on his website, and makes them freely available to port to great platforms like the Amiga. There is also a super Windows version. I am not really a programmer, but I'm learning.
Why did you port this? Good question. In 1997, AHI author Martin Blom released SpeakFreely for AHI, based on the SF6.1b source. Like all things, it was eventually obsoleted. Things like the Look Who's Listening feature didn't post my details to the LWL server. I tried to get Martin to take an interest in SpeakFreely and port the new version, but he wasn't interested. I took it upon myself then to get the GCC compiler and wrestle with the new source, stripping in Martin's AHI device handling code, and behold, it worked!!!
What do I need? Amiga with 68030/50 and an FPU. 68020 will work, but I wouldn't recommend it. You need AHI and a sampler or sound card. Really, you have to have some kind of amplifier for your mike if you have a sampler. This has given me lots of trouble, so I can't vouch for the audio quality of AmigaSF. Please email me if you have any success with AmigaSF!!!
Will there ever be a GUI version of SpeakFreely? Probably not. SpeakFreely is such a complex program, and so deeply rooted in Unix, that it would be very difficult for me to make a GUI version. It will most likely need ixemul.library forever as well, because it's super-easy to port from the Unix source this way, rather that having to re-write the software for every new version.
How do I use this program? Read the manual!!! Well, okay, I'll go over the basics. SpeakFreely is made up of several programs:
SFSPEAKER is the 'daemon' process. You launch it in a shell and it intercepts calls from other people, processes the audio, plays it. The only option that's inportant here is the -a option. It prints how to return a call to someone, so you're rather stuck without it. I use -aRAM:REPLY, so all you have to do to return someone's call is type execute ram:reply
SFMIKE connects you to another SpeakFreely user. The options you can use are many, for instance sfmike -t 158.152.127.151 would connect you to me and you would be using GSM compression. There are many forms of compression with concessions to your connection speed and processor speed.
SFLWL Queries the Look Who's Listening server to see who is online. SFLWL -hLWL.FOURMILAB.CH Brian would query lwl.fourmilab.ch to see if I'm online.
SFLWLDThe Look Who's Listening daemon, if you want to run your own LWL server.
SFECHO is an echo server. It allows people to connect to it, and have the sound sent back to them for testing.
SFLAUNCH is not working yet. It's going to be a GUI for SF. I'll finish it someday. Meantime, there's an AREXX script in the archive that provides a minimal GUI.
What works and what doesn't: In the original port, speakfree_face didn't work. In Amiga version 1.1, it should launch Multiview. (Sorry it's untested, because I don't get my whole face image sent to me, maybe because I'm connecting to myself.)
The -a option of SFSPEAKER used to return a bunch of Unix junk (like /bin/sh), in 1.1 it's been taken out, so you can execute the reply file without having to wade through wierd Unix commands.
Audio Blocking has been enabled in 1.1, so it runs much faster. I therefore dropped the system requirements to 68020+FPU. The realistic minimum is a 68030/50 +FPU. It would work on an 030/25, but only using ADPCM compression. Try to express to Windoze Lusers that they need to "switch to ADPCM compression to talk to you". You might as well teach a monkey to recite Shakespere.
You need a 'termcap' file. It's a UNIX thing. You need to have ECGS system (Geek Gadgets) installed on your Amiga, but there's another way round. When you unpack the archive, there is a directory there called lib. This is where the termcap files live, so make an assign... assign GG: to your SpeakFreely directory. When SF launches, it will load GG:lib/terminfo/u/unknown.
Download:
