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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Star Control II was released in 1992, a year before Doom, and it was able to play beautiful, rich 4-channel MOD music via PC speaker, on a 80386 @ 40Mhz.

Scream Tracker, a music composition software, was able to pull of the same feat, 4 channels of 8-bit voices, in 1990.

However cool and useful the PC speaker output was, it was the a hand-soldered "Covox" lookalike, a passive DAC built out of a resistor ladder and attached to the printer port, which you actually connected to your hi-fi amplifier.

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Fast Tracker 2, admittedly "bit" later than 1990, could route playback of however many channels you used to the speaker.

Worth noting that the quality in these cases was pretty good. A bit staticky but still well above Wolfenstein 3D sound effects most people associate with PC Speaker (covox-less).

> However cool and useful the PC speaker output was, it was the a hand-soldered "Covox" lookalike, a passive DAC built out of a resistor ladder and attached to the printer port, which you actually connected to your hi-fi amplifier.

I must have built at least a couple of dozen of these for various people.

Good times! I made one as a kid and remember thinking there is no way in heck this thing will work. My mind was blown when it worked first time.

No, RealSound was not a Covox-like hardware dongle. It was PC speaker only. Play the first few minutes of Mean Streets or Martian Memorandum or Countdown in DOSBox and you'll hear it.

I know. Experiencing that made me learn about PWM, and I was able to reproduce, harshly, a voice sample on my 2 MHz 8-bit home computer, by bit-banging the tape recorder port's 1-bit output.

I did this on an Apple IIe years before I had a sound card on my PC (or a sampler for my Amiga). It seemed so cool to me, even if I didn't exactly understand how it worked.

You could play music on the C64 by sampling the tape ports 1bit input and twiddling the sound chips volume accordingly.

You could of course store the samples too, to play back later, but doing realtime sampling into 64KB of RAM didn't exactly let you store much... And a 1MHz CPU didn't let you do much compression if you wanted to keep up..

You could in fact play four sample channels (with filters) plus two SID channels. However, the tech to do that was only discovered around 2008.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZMioAPZcays

https://youtube.com/watch?v=D2lEVw7fsMY

Must've been an Am386 or OC since the 33 MHz part was the fastest Intel 386DX.

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