«System Beeps» is a music album in shape of an MS-DOS program that features original music composed for PC Speaker using the same basic old techniques like ones found in classic PC games. It follows the usual retrocomputing demoscene formula — take something rusty and obsolete, and push it to eleven — and attempts to reveal the long hidden potential of this humble little sound device. You can hear it in action and form an opinion on how successful this attempt was at Bandcamp, or in the video below. The following article is an in-depth overview of the original PC Speaker capabilities and making of the project, for those who would like to know more.
What an amazing work of art, and I love the detailed description of how it was made using nothing but the PC speaker. This article is quite detailed, and the project itself is released under the CC-BY license.
for an example of the third method (using the pc speaker as a crude DAC): did anyone play the DOS game Warlords? At the time I was pretty shocked at the (two or three) sounds it put out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3kheGeE9xQ#t=0m23s
Had a Windows 3.1 driver to do it, could play Amiga modules out from the PC speaker without using an Adlib sound card. Was fantastic considering even an Atari ST could do it through the YM2149. Never understood why it was so “complicated” to play digitized sounds, despite their memory usage on memory constrained systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts069msIzg0
Try these, you old school fan-antics :
https://winworldpc.com/product/pc-speaker-driver-wi/pc-speaker-driver-windows-31
https://remember.the-aero.org/speaker/index.htm
http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?t=269&language=en
MamiyaOtaru,
I remember programming it to play wav files, or was it voc? I don’t remember the exact details. You technically could only turn the speaker on or off, but by doing so faster than the speaker was able to move you could get it to simulate an analog waveform. On my PC the quality was remarkably good, but much too quiet.
,
There were a few games that used the PC speaker that way, this post mentions alone in the dark and links.
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=559502
I still remember how amazed I was when I first got my hands on a copy of Pinball Fantasies and installed it on our family computer which at the time didn’t have a sound card. At last I had something that at least resembled the experience my Amiga-friends took for granted 😀
I found this clip on youtube, unfortunately it’s just the intro but you get the idea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb8mLBa3dcg
If I remember correctly FastTracker was able to play modules through pc-speakers too. I know that there where other players that could. The reason it wasn’t that common in games early on was because it was so heavy on the cpu (as stated in the article above)
and your friend is probably still laughing … what a pathetic attempt 😀
Sorry, hardcore Amiga fan over here! 😉
The original intro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6z6sSP8kdE
Of course they laughed. Really hard. But not for long though 😀
Ten-year me where still pretty satisfied. And I still to this day believes that the game plays better on the pc with it’s hi-res mode and a decent sound card.
I love the Amiga (and the c64). Over the years I’ve built up a little collection of my own, they got really cheap when people started abandoning the platform.
One of my favorites for sure! 🙂
Yes! Warlords, fond memories 🙂 Indeed the sounds did amaze me then.
PC Speaker echoes on 😛
My buddy once sent me this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJghR7CuxG0 music from Portal 2, which I opened sort of in the background and kinda forgot about it. Audio was routed to headphones which were on the PC case …once this chiptune started playing, I thought “wut happnd to my pc speaker / has it gone mad?!”
Access’ Countdown had digitized voice samples and music played through the PC speaker. It was pretty amazing. This is probably using Soundblaster emulation but still pretty impressive for 1990:
https://youtu.be/OVByZB1LCow
Fun game too.