PCM Playback Via PC Speaker in DOS Games - NintendoComplete
579A selection of music and effects from PC games that utilized the internal PC speaker, or "beeper", to playback digital audio without the use of a sound card.
Most of the time, the PC speaker is regarded with derision. It was never intended to play anything but simple, utilitarian signal "beeps" like you hear at the post screen on boot. It was (and still is) used to indicate if any issues that occur before the video gets a chance to initialize itself.
When it was used in a game, it was usually pretty bad. More times than not I found myself reaching for the volume knob and cranking it down as fast as I could. Of course, most people didn't have this luxury - my first IBM PC was a Tandy 1000TX that, among all of its other fairly fancy features, had an adjustable volume dial on the front of the case, right next to the reset button, extra ports and headphone jack. The Tandy had the luxury of somewhat improved sound quality compared to the PC speaker, so I didn't get subjected to the irritating squeals as much as many people did, but still - the internal beeper, nostalgic though it may be, was pretty horrendous when used in the traditional manner.
However, there was always the odd game that would really pleasantly surprise you: one that somehow did the impossible and played REAL sounds and music from some mysterious corner of the inside of the PCs case! Without any visible speakers, Sound Blaster TSRs, or anything else, the PC would sometimes talk, make explosions that weren't just white noise, and when you were really lucky, playback a short digital recording of its music. It's hard to really express how exciting it was to find a game like that (or how often I would load those games up just to hear the clip, then exit and reload to hear it again!).
So, as a tribute to this cool-as-shit use of a piece-of-shit bit of hardware that's been standard for almost 40 years now, I've recorded quite a number of examples of this. The games featured cover much of the 80s and early 90s - I'm sure you'll know at least a couple of them if you gamed on computers way back.
In the latter half of the video, I wanted to demonstrate just how versatile this manipulation of the beeper could prove to be by loading up FastTracker2 (a mod tracker for Dos), and played back MOD music extracted from a few (quite famous) games and a song from (the ever awesome) Reptile & Sky, all through the PC speaker. Emulating a machine equivalent to a 386/25, I had to heavily scale back the quality settings, since using the PC speaker in such a way consumes a massive amount of CPU cycles, but it still sounds pretty impressive.
I hope you enjoy it, and I hope your ears don't bleed too badly!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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