[camlorn]

Right, time to clear up misconceptions, since someone bothered to necro this.

Windows filesystem is known to be slower than linux filesystem. Dead souls runs on windows with a max of 64 players and Cratylus has admitted over dchat that he can't update the binary anymore--he had to jump through hoops with mingw to get it to compile because of some problem or other with cygwin licenses.

People not recommending cygwin astonishes me, kind of. I think that it's more because it takes quite a lot of know-how to use it properly and most people who try to run these things are scared away by the first compiler error--"missing dll?" what's a dll? is probably the most common first question, if I had to guess. I'm sure there's some obscure reasons why cygwin is bad, but I have yet to find them.

In regards to OP. Firstly, OP is almost certainly not using narrator--if I had to guess it's jaws, nvda, or window-eyes. Probably jaws. On that note.

Cygwin will work reasonably well with jaws, and I just tried it in nvda, which is free. I don't know about window-eyes, but I know several people who have gotten roguelikes to work, which is way more than what ssh requires (and, to be honest, I'm impressed with that). I, personally, have had success with ssh in cygwin and a winscp account--there's some oddities, but as long as you don't try remote editing, you're generally fine.

I'm going to throw this out there, as well. There's a text editor called edsharp that works with all the popular screen readers--the guy who wrote it is blind and he wrote it for the blind. That said, it's got quite a few things uncommon in windows editors, even the programming ones, and quite a few helpful esoteric features, so you sighted people might want to check it out if you can get past the awful interface--it's great for the blind, but I suspect it looks really horrid--the menus are extremely, extremely long because the intent is for them to serve as a sort of hotkey lookup, kind of (you find it once, remember the hotkey, and just use that).


Now, here's one no one on here has considered--linux. Gnome comes with a screen reader that's actually halfway decent and of corse free. It's called orca. There's instructions floating around on how to get a ubuntu live cd to boot into orca (and how to get a ubuntu live cd set up in the first place), and it's really not that hard. You have to actually install it (either real computer or virtual machine--beware, virtual machines can give audio troubles) to save your changes, but the live cd should let you know whether or not you could stand to use it. It's good enough that you can get on the internet and code, but there is a bit of a learning curve.

But, I suspect that the OP has moved on, judging by one of his recent posts, from trying to make his own mud.