Perhaps this is something along those lines?
At Caltech some students would see how bright an LED could get if you immersed it in a liquid nitrogen bath.
There was always something fun going on.
Besides, IBM PC-compatible systems already had a reliable way of making basic sounds - the PC speaker. There was no need for the techniques you're describing on that platform.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of old games doing this for fun too.
I've read it a few times (half-heartedly) and then just to be sure (quite a few glasses of wine consumed already) I did a search for the word "screen" - nope, but not exactly conclusive.
There are several theories espoused but one comment is: "In a brief email conversation with Al Lowe ... he probably used the COMMAND.COM file as the basis for this code ..."
Your assertion about "reliable way of making basic sounds" is sort of true, if you ignore the shonky hardware that used to and get shipped as a "speaker". It's better nowadays and largely an anachronism. Back in the day you'd wedge a Soundblaster into an ISA slot along with some reasonable speakers or really good headphones and job done.
Your parent may be thinking of the silly games that used to be played with big old Winchester discs on big IDM gear and the like.
As someone else mentioned, it shows up in the GIF animation, about 45 seconds in, as a sequence of text boxes.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Aznd.gif
> Your assertion about "reliable way of making basic sounds" is sort of true, if you ignore the shonky hardware that used to and get shipped as a "speaker".
On the IBM PC, one of the channels on the PIT (programmable interval timer) was hooked up to a speaker. It didn't sound great, but it could at least make simple tones on its own, and even music, without sucking up too much CPU time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ
The Apple II had it much worse. It had a built-in speaker as well, but no timers -- the speaker was connected directly to the memory address $C030, such that performing a read or write operation on that address would toggle the state of the speaker (on/off). Playing a tone required the CPU to hit that address in an appropriately sized loop; since the CPU wasn't particularly fast to begin with, it was nearly impossible to play audio while anything else was going on.
Nowhere. It is shown in the animation posted in the article, which you may have not noticed was animated if your eyes jumped over it quickly enough.
The post says "there's a part in the game where the main character (Larry) has to write a program in 8088 assembly language as part of his tribal initiation. [...] The code shown in the game is:"
Emphasis mine.