[Wine] Re: The Talking Moose

[neuroshock]

austin987 wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:10 PM, neuroshock<wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
> 
> > Anyone here remember the old Talking Moose desktop toy from the 80's? For the unitiated, the Talking Moose was a simple applet on old Mac computers that periodically displayed an animated Bullwinkle-lookalike moose in the corner of the screen, spouting witty phrases or biting insults, as well as commenting on various activities like opening and closing programs or inserting disks. (The moose's behavior was highly customizable.) He's not for everybody, but I miss the guy.
> > 
> > Lo and behold, the project was resurrected for the modern Windows era:
> > 
> > http://www.halls.md/moose/index.htm
> > 
> > (There's also a Mac version at http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/moose.htm.)
> > 
> > It's a tiny, simple desktop Windows applet that seems to confine itself entirely to a nice and neat single directory (that is, there's no messy installation), but, much to my dismay, I cannot seem to get it to run in Wine, nor can I diagnose the problem. Can anyone else get it to work, or, if not, offer up some helpful suggestions?
> > 
> 
> Appears to need vbruntimes (winetricks vbrun60). After that, installs
> fine, and runs, but doesn't play. According to the website, it needs
> voices, perhaps you can find some online/from windows and put them in
> the right place.
> 
> For future reference, most people won't respond unless you try it
> yourself and give the problem, with terminal output/symptoms...
> 
> -- 
> -Austin


Thanks for the timely reply!

I had already succeeded in getting the applet installed. (My apologies for not being more clear in my first post.) And when the applet didn't work (see below for details), I installed Microsoft Text-to-Speech (see, for example, http://www.bytecool.com/voices.htm), but it didn't change anything.

When I attempt to run wine moose.exe, the icon correctly appears in my system tray, and the moose avatar itself correctly appears in the upper corner of the screen as expected. But there's clearly a problem, because the avatar shows the message "Voice Error: I'm sick" and won't play any audio or exhibit any animation.

Meanwhile, the output to the console consists of many (presumably harmless) warnings:


> fixme:ole:OLEPictureImpl_Render Not quite correct implementation of rendering icons...


followed by four repetitions of:


> E: shm.c: mmap() failed: Cannot allocate memory


and then:


> pulse.c:200: pulse_new: Assertion `p->context' failed.
> fixme:ntdll:RtlNtStatusToDosErrorNoTeb no mapping for 80000101
> err:ole:COMPOBJ_DllList_Add couldn't load in-process dll L"C:\\Program Files\\Common Files\\Microsoft Shared\\Speech\\sapi.dll"
> err:ole:create_server class {96749377-3391-11d2-9ee3-00c04f797396} not registered
> err:ole:CoGetClassObject no class object {96749377-3391-11d2-9ee3-00c04f797396} could be created for context 0x5


(I have the library sapi.dll in the requested directory already), followed by many copies of:


> fixme:ole:OleLoadPictureEx (0x134308c,18574,1,{7bf80980-bf32-101a-8bbb-00aa00300cab},x=0,y=0,f=0,0x32f398), partially implemented.


(Only the second number---in this case 18574---changes from line to line.)

If I quit and run the program again, I get slightly different error messages. This time, the middle block of errors is:


> err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {65dbddef-0725-11d3-b50c-00c04f797396} not registered
> err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {65dbddef-0725-11d3-b50c-00c04f797396} not registered
> err:ole:create_server class {65dbddef-0725-11d3-b50c-00c04f797396} not registered
> fixme:ole:CoGetClassObject CLSCTX_REMOTE_SERVER not supported
> err:ole:CoGetClassObject no class object {65dbddef-0725-11d3-b50c-00c04f797396} could be created for context 0x17


Despite the slight differences in error messages to the console, I always get the same behavior: There's no voice or animation, and if I click on the moose avatar or right-click on the tray icon and select "Control Panel," the applet crashes with the message "Run-time error '-2147200966 (8004503a)': Automation error."

I hope this extra information is helpful. At the very least, solving this problem might help get text-to-speech working in wine more generally from now on.

Thanks!