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Comment by jordache | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else remember that driver that allowed the internal speaker to output wave sound?

I remember days of playing SimCity 2000 and Doom without a sound card, so it was just beeps and buzzes. Then one day I discovered that driver and started to enjoy small sounding wave sound

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Not exactly that but a similar story for you. I was a huge dork in high school and figured out the sound API on my HP-48G which was just really a way to play a sound from the internal speaker at a frequency and duration. I programmed the first parts of Holst's Jupiter using my calculator and a friend's calculator. Man that was real fun to do. Created an API on top of that to simplify it to play notes at a certain length.

That calculator was amazing. Real nice programming environment there for a high school kid that didn't have programming everywhere like we do today.

I did something similar with an Arduino. I managed to get an okay Star Wars out of it.

As for calculators, my school unfortunately standardized in TI: You guys had RPL, we have TI-Basic, which is worse than actual BASIC. And our calculators cost more! (Second-hand, anyways, because let's face it, nobody buys their calculators new)

I like to think my TI-83+ from 15 years ago is still being used by some kid who bought it off some kid who bought it off some kid who's the guy that bought it off me when I finished college.

What boggles the mind is that they still sell those calculators. For like $60 apiece.

Yes, I remember, speaker.drv. there was also one for win 3.11. I have fond memories of squeezing Windows on a bootable 2M3.0 floppy with UC2 compression and ramdisk to use it on the dos machines in university

Searching for that filename returns some very nostalgic websites. Here's one[0], which refers to speaker.drv as a way to play audio in NCSA Mosaic. It links to SPEAK.EXE on ftp.microsoft.com; incredibly, the URL[1] still works. The page must be about 20 years old.

[0] https://boutell.com/faq/oldfaq/winsound.htm [1] ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/SPEAK.EXE

There were some DOS games that had that baked in. Here's one example from 1987 (!), that used CGA graphics. They couldn't really spare the processing power during the game itself, so they kept it for the intro and the main menu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yL-u7lsMxk

Wow that must have been magic to anyone not aware such capabilitily existed

The first time I launched a game that played less beeppy sounds than usual on my PC without a soundcard, actually almost understandable words, I nearly had an heart attack because I knew very well this was impossible. I needed a few minutes to recover.

Back when I saw it for the first time on real hardware, my jaw did drop.

I remember building a resistor ladder DA converter and connecting it to the parallel port. Software like No$ gameboy emulator used it, and it was easy enough to write to the parallel port directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

Was a fairly common thing back in the day for software to support it, also went by the name Disney Sound System.

I still have the connector with the resistor ladder laying in a drawer down here. A parallel port plug with a audio connector coming out of the back. :) Good times.

Somewhat (maybe) related : another world from Éric Chahi used to support the pc speaker as sound output, and had digitized sound effects and voices (very low quality but still incredible).

The PC port of Pinball Fantasies could also play MOD music through the internal speaker fairly nicely. My personal favorite is still the "Magic Mushroom" disk, which played the audio part of an Air-O-Zone air freshener commercial, all in 360K. :)

hey. your story intrigued me, so i found it and hosted it somewhere more free. Its quite rare these days. It doesn't work in Dosbox on OSX unfortunately so I couldn't see it.

This is: echo Magic Mushroom Echo -------------- echo This Program was made by the R&D Team at echo the Cleveland Corp. of Australia at Hendra echo To turn 'Magic Mushroom off press any key echo Bye,Bye,Bye

virus total scan (its clean): https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/34b703cace0a2464899c67fa1...

Because its so small (206K), it fits in a pastebin: curl http://pastebin.com/raw/D95mhEvE | base64 -D > mushroom.zip

It may not work in dosbox, but mushroom.ovl is just raw 8-bit[1] linear audio sampled at 8kHz so you can load it up in your raw-audio-capable app of choice. On linux try "aplay mushroom.ovl", for example.

[1] Actually only 6 bits per byte are used; presumably this was done to improve decoding speed or something.

Most of these applications employ this one weird trick to get digitized sound out of the speaker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker#Pulse-width_modulat...

The result is 6 bits of resolution, along with a high pitched squeak during playback, depending on the output circuitry and speaker characteristics (it's less noticeable when a low-pass filter is added).

Cool! Read as: signed 8-bit PCM at 8000 Hz with Audacity. I had to normalize it to remove a DC bias and reduce the volume.

curl http://pastebin.com/raw/uunJFtcK | base64 -D > mushroom.mp3

Where'd you find this? I'm trying to find out what happened to "Cleveland Corp of Australia".

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Spelljammer_-_Pirates_of_R... had full music and sound effects through PC speaker. Very low quality, yes. But, it was amazingly close to the merely low quality audio of most PC games of the time even when you did have a sound card.

I think Linux still has a driver that allows the internal speaker to emulate a sound card badly even now.

This was great, it's surprising it wasn't mentioned in the article or comments. A shame the isn't a speaker wddm.

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