8 ms·
PC Speaker To Eleven
- justtopost 8y agoThis is cool, but doesent even seem to mention the ScreamTracker pc speaker hack. Maybe it was done the same way, but it was able to output about 8khz bandwidth, 1 bit rendered and anti-aliased from 8 or 16 bit sound samples to the pc speaker. It worked so well I still have tape recordings I made with a hacked up rca plug attached. The paralell port adapters sounded better, but had their own neat lofi sound. About the best you could do without a sound card, which were stupid expensive back then. It was a far cry from the 'musical' beeping I was used to.
- httpsterio 8y agoIs this the same used in the 8088 mph demo productions end credits? https://youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y https://youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
- magicalhippo 8y agoReminded me of Mean Streets, with it's RealSound[1] voices https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4?t=153 https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4?t=153 Was amazed when I heard it for the first time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound
- magicalhippo 8y agoAnd having now read the article I see it mentions RealSound, albeit not Mean Streets. The digitized speech was something else when I heard it. Game too, for that matter.
- gorb314 8y agoI agree, even as a young kid with no idea how make the speaker even go beep (I was young, ok?) hearing the music/speech coming from Mean Streets was amazing. Everything else up to that point was just beeping and blipping... IIRC the volume was very low though.
- jchw 8y agoIIRC 8088 mph has to go to great lengths for the timings to line up, using cycle counting instead of interrupts for timing, among other hacks/shortcuts. I'm guessing that typical 386/486 CPUs were powerful enough to not need this level of optimization.
- ghusbands 8y agoThe article does clearly mention it (and has links to videos of games that used it) > PC Speaker can be turned in a DAC either by disabling timer count then enabling/disabling sound output, which makes it a very basic 1-bit DAC, or by using sound channel of the PIT to generate short pulses of variable width (PWM) at carrier frequency set by the timer interrupt, which effectively gives a much better 6-bit DAC.
- Synaesthesia 8y agoAwesome he made his own VSTi available which we can use to make chip tunes plus impulse responses of tiny speakers to give it a realistic sound, and released it all for free!
- diydsp 8y agoThere is a niche of 1-bit music using such creative techniques. See also: 1. Mister Beep, from Poland. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mister_Beep/ http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mister_Beep/ 2. Tristan Perich, from NYC. https://www.1bitsymphony.com/ https://www.1bitsymphony.com/ 3. Noah Vawter, 1-bit Groovebox: https://web.archive.org/web/20090212172253/http://web.media.mit.edu/~nvawter/projects/1bit/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090212172253/http://web.media....
- AstralStorm 8y agoJust like with hit points, one is all you need. Just enough lives. ;) Or in this case, high enough and stable enough frequency.
- userbinator 8y agoThe most amazing thing I've heard done with a PC speaker is in the last part of this equally amazing demo (starts at 6:37 --- the parts before have more "normal" beeper music): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y Explanation here: https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how-its-done/ https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how...
- pdpi 8y agoTo be fair, that whole demo is a technical tour de force. Some more information about it: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/ https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...
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- fhood 8y agoHoly shit. I've never heard anything even remotely like that from a pc speaker. How the hell did they accomplish that on a 1981 pc?!?!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- AstralStorm 8y agoDisabling interrupts and eating all available CPU in handcoded assembly. 386 can do it with no tricks. And you even have some spare horsepower to dither for improved quality.
- Zibri 8y agoI completely agree with you! The tune at 6:30 is the best I heard on PC Speaker!
- micheljansen 8y agoI remember playing a Golf game called World Class Leaderboard on my 386 and being absolutely amazed by the sound coming out of my PC speaker. It used RealSound to play the sounds of birds on the title screen and realistic golf sound effects and voices during gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21a_bbajmjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21a_bbajmjQ
- Jaruzel 8y agoI was about to comment exactly the same thing. The commentary that still resonates with me even now, is 'He can't be happy with that one!' and the crowd 'ooohs' and 'ahhhs'
- rleigh 8y agoAnd the original Links (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5TPAxMfpbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5TPAxMfpbQ) from the same company. Really nice use of the PC speaker in the intro, as well as the game.
- mrunkel 8y agoAhh the good old days. I remember writing a program in 6502 assembler that could record and playback a digital sample, all using the speaker on the Apple ][+. I'm not sure if I also connected a microphone or if I just yelled at the speaker. I believe the max I could record was about 7 seconds before I ran out of memory. But it worked and I was happy and proud. :) I remember being amazed how i'd spent so many hours coding something that executed in such a short amount of time.
- morkfromork 8y agoThere was an Apple ][ program in an issue of Nibble Magazine that could sample audio from the cassette port, save to disk and play.
- whywhywhywhy 8y agoAlthough the engineering behind getting a good sound out of the PC speaker is fascinating. Still wishing the PC standard from the get go had included sound as a first class citizen. I think this decision back then still ripples through the machines today and sound never truly feels like an integral part of the machine on Windows (Realtek audio driver) and you'll never have the feeling of a built in boot sound on your machine which felt so good on Macs till it was disabled recently. It's not like computers didn't have good sound back then either compare the Lotus III example [0] from the article with the same on the Amiga hardware from around the same time [1] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72vZ1asBIXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72vZ1asBIXQ [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgGSBoivBIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgGSBoivBIY
- ajmurmann 8y ago"[...]a built in boot sound on your machine which felt so good on Macs[...]" Ever since I got my first iBook in college I've had mainly negative associations with that sound. Too frequently you'd open the thing in the middle of a lecture with 100+ people in the room and the sound starts blasting. The only solution I found was plugging in headphones so that the sound would go there instead.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y agoAs I recall, if you muted the sound before shutting down it would stay muted and not play the startup sound. My Mac experience starts at the white iBook G3 running OSX 10.2 though, so it could be that this behaviour is a new thing. I now have a 13" TouchBar MacBook Pro and it makes a sound when I plug the charger in no matter what I do to the volume settings. When I have it muted and open I can actually see it unmute the sound so that it can make the charger sound then mute it again when it's done.
- ajmurmann 8y agoYep the muting already worked back then. So it always came down to crossing your fingers and hoping you muted before you left the house.
- dekhn 8y agoto learn assembly I wrote a "PC speaker clicker" that just strobed the click register and had a small timing loop to play A440. A person in the room spoke up when I played it- "that's not A440, it's off slightly. Oh, and I have perfect pitch- it's about 439". I had a small bug in my timing routine that made the pitch slightly lower, which I fixed.
- grenoire 8y agoI'm surprised that he did actually have perfect pitch.
- dekhn 8y agome too. I can't even hear any difference between 1hz intervals around 440.
- ttul 8y agoI sang in a children’s choir growing up. There were several kids with perfect pitch over the years. It’s an incredible skill; they really do get the pitch exactly right - even better than the piano.
- jacquesm 8y agoMakes you wonder what the difference is, genetically speaking. The one set of genes codes for a crystal oscillator and the other for resistors and capacitors or the biological equivalent.
- dekhn 8y agoThis is a really interesting area of research. I've been following roughly since the time I wrote the code I described above (at UCSF, a medical research institution). At the time, my genetics professor (Nelson Friemer) theorized it was primarily genetic (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090702170209.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090702170209.h...) and even found some genetic associations. I don't think that's really super-important. For example, when he heard that perfect pitch was frequently found in children of musicians, his conclusion is that it was inherited genetically. I think, instead, children of musicians are exposed to pitches and their labels (notes) very early, during neural plasticity, and develop the mental associations, probably with some assist from genetics. The biophysics of audition are pretty interesting; see http://dailynexus.com/2017-08-24/hearing-a-biophysical-and-neurological-enigma/ http://dailynexus.com/2017-08-24/hearing-a-biophysical-and-n... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_cell One could imagine any number of genetic changes that could affect the ability of the physical system (these parts) as well as the neural parts to do this, but personally I think this is much more learned behavior, not genetically dominated.
- dekhn 8y agoI had a cracked game on my Apple IIe which included a side program (included by the cracker) that played 3-channel beethoven sonata.
- rchaud 8y agoDamn this takes me back. I'm 10 years old and my 'gaming setup' is my mom's 386 work computer. No sound card, so I played and completed games like Doom I, Chip's Challenge (built-in w/ Win 3.1 I believe) and Allan Border's Cricket with those beeps and boops.
- DougN7 8y agoWhat always amazes me is this could have been done back in the day if someone had had the vision and belief that it was possible. Understandable that they didn’t because it’s so far beyond the then current level of expectation. So that makes me wonder what could be done with what we have now if we only had the vision and belief that it was possible? What will someone demo if 50 years on an “ancient” Windows 10 PC or iPad?
- grkvlt 8y agoI'm not 100% sure that's true - for example, today we have hugely improved development environments, IDEs, source control, collaboration tools, simulators, debuggers, documentation (particularly in terms of easily available and instant access to low level details and also searchability) and so on, which (probably?) make it easier to produce code, and perform tasks that would have been impossible or intractable back then...
- DougN7 8y agoYes, the environment definitely makes it easier and more feasible. Still, what if we have Star Trek-like transporter building blocks today but just can’t see it yet?