Aicom software in this repository -- notice
============================================

Aicom Corporation, of San Jose, California, made the Accent line of speech synthesizers:
the serial Accent SA, the internal Accent PC, the Accent-mini and the Messenger-IC (a
PCMCIA card).  The Accent's speech chip, which Aicom called the AI901, is the Silicon
Systems SSI-263 that this project models.  This repository carries two pieces of Aicom's
software, so that both can run again on that model:

  aicom-accent-sa/    the Accent SA's own firmware, run on an emulated Intel 8085
    u2.BIN  64 KB  8085 program ROM
                   "AICOM CORPORATION COPYRIGHT, WORLD, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989."
                   sha256 8d6aa48880d1efd02f8dc759741c16b8902db33dcc2856d1f0db4776149992ad
    u3.BIN  32 KB  pronunciation dictionary, part 1 ("AICOM COPYRIGHT1")
                   sha256 248dd6fb6d08f6b4316ce38f83fd330e55dde80ead4b26a652ba228e6b46859a
    u4.BIN  32 KB  pronunciation dictionary, part 2 ("AICOM COPYRIGHT2")
                   sha256 7c12a8cf56a573cd83c928d61cd49e90b3afc810279e8ee54852d7b90042d155
    Found in an old archive of text-to-speech ROMs and passed to us by spacepup, who is
    credited here with permission.  The dictionaries store letters as ASCII minus 21h
    ("5 -3 &$.42" = VANTAGEOUS).

  aicom-accent-mini/  the Accent-mini's DOS device driver, run under an emulated PC
    SPKEMS.DVC     "Accent-EMS" V4.5
                   sha256 6b99fea4cc5534ee1f693b141df9d734057f116d0a36972e3949d86db00cbe79
    From messenger-ic_update_v1.04.ima in the preserved Aicom Messenger IC archive,
    https://id10t-tech.com/filedump/Aicom%20Messenger%20IC.zip

These files are Aicom's work: copyright Aicom Corporation and any other original rights
holders.  They are not ours, and this repository's MIT license does not cover them.  No
license to redistribute them has been granted.  We include them because, as far as we can
find, there is no one left to ask:

  - 1993: a University of North Carolina survey of virtual-environment technology
    (Holloway and Lastra, TR93-033) lists the "AICOM Accent SA", $500 and up.
  - January 1998: the Library of Congress's assistive-device catalogue still lists the
    products and Aicom as a supplier
    (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED420140.pdf, printed pages 14 and 24).
  - 8 September 2000: a post to the Speakup mailing list ("Voice Synthesizers") reports
    that Aicom had stopped making the Accent SA, Accent PC, Messenger and Accent-mini; its
    owner said it could not compete with software synthesizers.
  - 1 March 2001: on the same list ("Accent Messenger IC synthesizer"), a Messenger owner
    looking for drivers did not know how to reach Aicom.  No one who replied knew whether
    its owner was still in business, and a web search found nothing.  The thread ends there.
  - We have found no later trace: no trademark, no corporate filing, no closure date, no
    buyer, and no word of what became of Aicom's engineering archive.  (The Japanese game
    developer also named Aicom, which closed in 2001, is a different company.)

Calling this software abandoned describes the preservation problem; it is not a license.
If you hold rights to it and want it removed, open an issue and it will be removed.
