What is Talking Moose and His Cartoon Carnival?

Are you feeling kind of lonely lately? Need some company while you’re chained to that keyboard? Maybe you should consider a talking moose. The first Talking Moose began appearing on Macintosh screens in 1986 as a shareware desk accessory. It gained widespread popularity through bulletin board services and shareware distribution outlets and eventually went through several revisions. Now it has been transformed into a full-color Control Panel device with improved animation and a complete Cartoon Carnival of strange and amusing characters. In its new, commercially released version from Baseline Publishing, Talking Moose comes with a variety of tools and applications that let you customize the program and experiment with the characters and what they say. But what exactly is Talking Moose?

Talking Moose and his Cartoon Carnival are an assortment of animated characters that pop up on your screen, for various reasons, and talk to you. Sometimes what they say is helpful, sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes it’s just annoying. The Talking Moose... greets you when you start your computer and says good-bye when you shut down. Between times he may pop up to remind you to get back to work if the computer has been idle too long. Or he may drop by to deliver some sarcastic remark or one-liner.

As you work, the Moose (or one of his pals) speaks the names of menu options when you choose them or tells you the names of windows when they open. He also reads and speaks the messages in dialog boxes and alerts. If you get tired of the Moose, you can use the Choose a Picture window... to select one of the other Cartoon Carnies to replace him — only one character at a time can be active.

Talking Moose uses MacinTalk to generate its speech. The program comes with an enhanced version of MacinTalk that is more compatible with System 7 than earlier versions and offers additional features such as the ability to interrupt the speech quickly with a mouse click. Talking Moose also comes with a complete utility program that lets you edit and personalize the spoken phrases. You can add your own moose jokes or change the greetings to suit your taste. With the Preferences dialog box..., you can determine when the Moose will appear and how he will behave. Additionally, with the optional Cartoon Creator application, you can produce your own animated characters and install them into the Talking Moose program.

If you’ve ever wanted to fool around with MacinTalk, this program is a good place to start. It comes with a Phonemes Reference desk accessory that provides a quick guide to the phonetic spellings used by MacinTalk to generate speech from text. The Moose Proof desk accessory reads any text that you’ve typed into your favorite word processor. Just select a block of text and copy it to the clipboard. Then paste it into Moose Proof and the Moose will read what you’ve written. If you want it to sound right, use the Phonemes Reference to help you change the text to the appropriate phonetic spelling. The documentation includes lots of advice on using MacinTalk.

If you want to use Talking Moose with other applications, the program includes a stack that makes Talking Moose compatible with HyperCard and another stack that lets you modify programs to work with Talking Moose. The Moose Goes Hyper stack provides XCMDs that allow you to control Talking Moose from within HyperCard stacks, and the Advanced Moose stack covers ResEdit and how to use it to customize applications for the Talking Moose.

Rubin, David M. (1992). The Audible Macintosh. (pgs. 403-405). SYBEX Inc.

Download Talking Moose and His Cartoon Carnival for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0 up to Mac OS 7.6

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II