so, there’s an old version on archive.org that was pretty easy to crack a serial number and run in a VM. It uses the older, low-quality Hebrew synthesis that wa

so, there’s an old version on archive.org that was pretty easy to crack a serial number and run in a VM. It uses the older, low-quality Hebrew synthesis that was cobbled together from German and French phonemes. I have physical CDROMs and serial numbers for one of the last versions ever published, but I haven’t been able to get them to run — they try to contact an activation server which no longer exists. I think this is just DRM, and in theory it can be bypassed, but no one has managed to do it yet. (I’ve gotten a couple people to look at it, but no one has had time to seriously dig in) The data files for Trope Trainer are mostly human-readable, lots of XML. But then there’s an incredible amount of hand-coded stuff implemented in the software - very detailed pronunciation rules for Hebrew, just written as, apparently, lots of switch statements. In principle it could be mapped out, but I’d feel more confident about it if we had a running copy of the newer version. I actually started reimplementing the old version as javascript- I managed to get the dectalk DLLs running in Wine, and then it’s just a matter of sending it the right phoneme codes… I had it accurately reciting the first few words of Genesis! but then someone mailed me the new, locked CDROMs, which derailed me