Some people might remember from really old DOS games, but... You can even use the PC speaker as a "soundcard" (Actually as a 1-bit DAC. Here's the function called a few thousand times per second when using the Linux audio subsystem, updating the 1-bit output to the speaker (timer control of this output is disabled in this operation mode, kernel config is CONFIG_SND_PCSP).

http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/sound/drivers/pcsp/pcsp...

"Say N if you have a sound card. Say M if you don't. Say Y only if you really know what you do."

There was this one game I picked up off the shelf at Target wayyyyyyyy back in the day (likely around 1990-1992) that had printed on the box a selling point that you could hear music without a sound card. It used the pc speaker. And sounded horrendous.

Still can't remember what the name of the game was and had been trying to track it down the last few years to see if it was as bad as I remembered.

I just remember high color (S?)VGA rendered/scanned in graphics, a man who was visiting alien planets and battling monsters. My 386 at the time was too underpowered to make the game remotely playable.

It likely used this technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound

I played "Mean Streets" back in the day and was blown away by the sound.

I later saved up enough allowance/birthday money to buy a Sound Blaster Pro - several hundred dollars for a card that is probably < $10 today. Christ.

It was also possible to record by sampling one of the parallel port pins. Lousy sound quality, but we manged to record a song and play it back over the speaker, and have it be recognizable.

If you're going to use a parallel port, use a resistor ladder and make a crude DAC out of it.

Great suggestion, but a little late. :) At 19, no EE experience, and only a few months of experience with C, we barely knew what we were doing. We also managed to fry one computer by turning up the amplifier too high.

> Say Y only if you really know what you do.

Ah, yes, the "Take off every Zig" option.

QBASIC had a very handy PLAY procedure for that :)

SOUND and RAND does amazing effects

Yes, I was effectively making my own version of that, though it was file-based instead of string-based.

The was a DOS pinball game that played amazing music and sound effects (at the time) over the PC speaker.

Epic Pinball?