From: Silas S. Brown <ssb22@cam.ac.

uk>
Date: 28 Jul 2011

Hi Jonathan,

As you may know, Macs are available in 2 architectures, PowerPC

and Intel, and up until recently Apple shipped a dynamic
translator called Rosetta with their Intel Macs, so PowerPC
programs will still run (albeit a bit slower) on both architectures.
However, Rosetta was made optional in 10.6 and dropped
completely in 10.7, which means now we HAVE to compile Intel.

It's possible to compile a "Universal binary" that contains both

PowerPC and Intel versions of the code. The problem with doing
this in eSpeak is that eSpeak expects different phoneme data
files depending on the CPU's endianness. Therefore, I patched
synthdata.cpp as follows, to make it read the phoneme data from
different files depending on the endianness:

--- espeak-1.45.04-source/src/synthdata.cpp 2011-04-25 17:22:27.000000000 +0100

+++ synthdata.cpp 2011-07-27 17:31:09.000000000 +0100
@@ -118,11 +118,16 @@
unsigned char *p;
int *pw;

- if((phoneme_tab_data = (unsigned char *)ReadPhFile((void *)

(phoneme_tab_data),"phontab",NULL)) == NULL)
+ #ifdef ARCH_BIG
+ #define BIG_ENDIAN_SUFFIX "BE"
+ #else
+ #define BIG_ENDIAN_SUFFIX ""
+ #endif
+ if((phoneme_tab_data = (unsigned char *)ReadPhFile((void *)
(phoneme_tab_data),"phontab" BIG_ENDIAN_SUFFIX,NULL)) == NULL)
return(-1);
- if((phoneme_index = (USHORT *)ReadPhFile((void *)
(phoneme_index),"phonindex",NULL)) == NULL)
+ if((phoneme_index = (USHORT *)ReadPhFile((void *)(phoneme_index),"phonindex"
BIG_ENDIAN_SUFFIX,NULL)) == NULL)
return(-1);
- if((phondata_ptr = ReadPhFile((void *)(phondata_ptr),"phondata",NULL)) ==
NULL)
+ if((phondata_ptr = ReadPhFile((void *)(phondata_ptr),"phondata"
BIG_ENDIAN_SUFFIX,NULL)) == NULL)
return(-1);
if((tunes = (TUNE *)ReadPhFile((void *)(tunes),"intonations",&length)) ==
NULL)
return(-1);

(An alternative approach would be to incorporate the

platforms/big_endian logic into the eSpeak runtime, which is
probably OK on a Mac as the CPU is quite fast.)

Attached is an eSpeak 1.45.04 compiled as a "Universal binary"

for i386 and PPC, with both the big-endian and little-endian
phoneme data files included and with the above patch to cause it
to read from the appropriate file depending on which
architecture it's running on. I've tested it on both
architectures and it works on both. As the university is just
about to upgrade all their Macs to 10.7 (which will not have
Rosetta), this is probably the last time I'll be able to test
any PPC code, so I thought I'd better get it in while I can!

Silas