With accessible games for many platforms readily available, not to mention a plethora of high quality text to speech voices for blind computer users to enjoy, it’s hard to remember a time when word processors were laborious to use, text to speech truly sounded robotic, and text adventure games were the norm. For those who grew up using Windows 95 and later versions, you missed out on a whole era of awesome games written for the Apple 2e. Many blind people had Apple 2 computers with Echo speech synthesizers in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s, myself included. I’ve often remembered the games I used to play on this system fondly, and now I can play them again!
I’m a little late to the party on this one, but thanks to the MESS emulator project and some enterprising blind gamers with copies of old disks, you too can experience the Apple 2, complete with echo’s less than fantastic speech patterns, from the comfort of your Windows or Mac computer. Here’s where you’ll find the files you need. Once you’ve downloaded the zip folder for your operating system, you’ll need to extract the files to a directory you can access easily. Since I’ve only used a Windows pc for this, the following suggestions are intended for that platform.
Since you’ll be starting the emulator and loading disks from the command line, I recommend creating a folder directly on your C drive if possible, so you can switch to it easily. I named mine mess for the sake of simplicity. Once you’ve extracted the zip archive there, you’re ready to get started. You may want to explore the included readme file before you start, and you may also want to look in the disks folder to familiarize yourself with the disk names. Here are the steps to get started with the egames disk:
- Press the Windows key + r to open the run dialog, type cmd to open the command prompt, and press enter.
- Type cd\mess and press enter to change focus to the directory you created.
- Type the following to load the egames disk: mess apple2ee –flop1 disks\egames.dsk and press enter. Yes, you type the letter e twice after apple2.
You’ll hear a beep, a pause while the disk loads, and then the echo speech will start. To read about switching disks, DOS commands, and all the other information you need to comfortably use the emulator, I highly recommend the included readme file. There’s also a text file with info about what you can find on each of the included disks. If you’re not ready to play with the programs yourself, here’s an example of the Echo speech you can listen to.
Once you get comfortable with the speech patterns, or your childhood memories come flooding back as mine did, you can enjoy all sorts of games. Find your way out of a maze in Great Escape, explore a haunted house in the game of the same name, or play more familiar games like Blackjack, Monopoly, and Oregon Trail. You can even load up the old Bex word processor if you like. Since much more advanced software is now available, you may wonder why reviving an old computer system has gotten me so excited. The truth is that technology’s rapid advancement often means that we lose track not only of our former hardware and software, but of the history that has made assistive technology what it is today. Though they may seem antiquated, these programs were remarkably innovative for their time, and started many blind computer users on a path to technical literacy.
