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Comment by kramerger | Hacker News Reader

Serious question:

The bios is a few megs large. Why not store sound clips and play them in case of an error?

I actually had a desktop motherboard, purchased about 2003-2004, that did this.

Mind you, as it slowly succumbed to age (capacitor plague, most likely), it would start repeating "No CPU Installed, No CPU Installed..." as I watched it boot without issue. Once the sound driver was configured, it would stop.

"ASUS POST Reporter" was one incarnation: http://web.archive.org/web/20081121022828/http://www.asus.co...

"System completed power on self test, computer now booting operating system" is forever burned into my mind.

Maybe modulation limitations? A square wave can often be output quite easily without the use of a DAC.

Also the tiny piezo speakers frequently used on motherboards are often pretty bad at functioning as general purpose speakers. Something like voice might not be clearly audible through one of them. (And also, localization would be an issue.)

The most amusing thing here is what those OTS speakers, being perfectly fine on the desktop mobos are... too large to be incorporated in any modern notebook.

Apple PowerPC Macs definitely did this - the car crash would play if POST failed.

YT collection of Mac chimes (~48s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkBcpXL94rA&t=48s

You'd need sound drivers to operate the sound chip. The small PC speaker that's easy to access is also very bad at rendering speech. Playing some music seems like an excellent solution.

With this reverse engineering done already, someone should be able to write a decoder app for looking up the error codes.

Have laptops had a separate pc speaker in recent memory?

No, but they seem to have some kind of compatibility wrapper to emulate the PC speaker in firmware. The early boot process on my laptop has plenty of beeps and boops I can enable but nothing more advanced than that until the operating system loads a real driver. If the UEFI firmware could play sound files, the laptop would come with much friendlier sounding (less shrill) noises.

A barebones single-channel sound driver shouldn't be complicated. It should also be simpler than "some kind of compatibility wrapper to emulate the PC speaker in firmware".

It's not a technical limitation, PC manufacturers just don't care about doing anything above the bare minimum to ship a cheap box.

Sony used to put in the effort in their VAIO machines like 24 years ago and gave them high quality boot sounds https://youtu.be/wPVIubVtdRY?t=907

The Vaio chime was my favorite

Like a voice saying "error 47"? A good question. If I had to guess I'd say probably either localization concerns or that it was just a continuation of a pattern that began well before BIOSs were large enough to store audio.

BIOS flash is a few megs larg., I think a few hundred kilobytes would be sufficient for either something generic (error 47, please consult user manual) or something more detailed (internal error, reset from back).

Doesn't need to be 44.1K stereo and localised voice

> and localised voice

Do you expect everyone to speak English? Localization would be critically important, and with a global supply chain, having one SKU for each language would cause you to get laughed out of a room if proposed.

> localised voice

> 44.1K stereo

Guess you never worked as L1 tech.

Obligatory 'Reebok or Nike': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uctpC2HnBfk

You could even jam a Klatt synth in there and some text strings to say in a Stephen Hawking voice upon boot, e.g., "memory error".

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