Dear FreeDOS community, it's great to be here, and amazing that a project such as FreeDOS exists, preserving access to some of the greatest software ever written. My name is Felix Grützmacher. I am 39, I work as a software developer in assistive technology, and I was born blind. In my spare time I play such video games as are accessible to me, my blindness restricting this set of games to mostly text adventure games from the 80s and early 90s, a fact which I don't find restricting at all because some of the best games are contained in this descriptor. ... Which brings me to my question. A substantial subset of these games don't run natively on Windows, which is the platform I mostly use. I can run some of them with the help of Dosbox, but this approach requires that a native DOS screen reader be running in the Dosbox environment, sending its output to a serial port which I redirect and pass to a speech synthesizer emulator running on the host computer. It sounds just as messy as it is, and it is slow as ... well, let's just say it does not exactly qualify as a walk in the park as it relies on an impressive chain of components. As soon as one of those stops working, I am literally left in the dark. Without speech output, that is. To make matters worse, I have grown rather disenchanted with Dosbox recently as it seems to have emulation problems which surface in some of the games I'd like to run, in some instances leading to garbage output. It's not really DOS, after all, but a thin layer atop Windows to run DOS games. FreeDOS to the rescue, or so I thought, but I have yet to find any documentation on how to create a blind-friendly environment with it. A native install seems to be out of the question: neither does my computer hav a serial port, nor am I in possession of a hardware speech synthesizer. The former might be acquired, but the latter, alas, is no longer on sale. So I guess what I need is a virtual machine running FreeDOS, but I have no idea how to install FreeDOS on a virtual machine without sighted assistance, and even if this could be accomplished, how would I then install a screen reader into that virtual machine, or for that matter, how would I get any files downloaded from the net into that virtual environment? If you have come this far in reading my ramblings, I hope you will be so kind as to offer some advice. And if the last few paragraphs have made no sense whatsoever, consider my question to be as follows: What is the established route by which a blind user may install and use FreeDOS? All the best, Felix
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