News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010). Parent comment

Re:What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) by cnvogel on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @06:00AM (#8879047)
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."

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) by techrat on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @09:58AM (#8880199)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) by bentcorner on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @12:48PM (#8881369)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) by dalke on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @07:49AM (#8879408)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) by TheLoneWolfling on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @08:20AM (#8879562)
If you're going to use a parallel port, use a resistor ladder and make a crude DAC out of it.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) by dalke on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @08:33AM (#8879639)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) by cbd1984 on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @10:59AM (#8880599)
> Say Y only if you really know what you do.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]