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Comment by heywire | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic -- does anyone remember a boot disk in the late 80's or early 90's that would play voice from the PC speaker, saying something to the effect of, "Help, I'm trapped inside the computer"? I can't remember if it was on my 8088 or something later...

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I've got an old file named HELPME.COM taken from my family's XT. My father pranked me with it for April Fools, 87 or 88 - he added it to the shutdown script that parked the hard drive. The complete phrase was "Help, somebody get me out of here, I'm trapped in this computer! Help, somebody!" It still works in DOSBOX, although you've got to turn the emulation speed way down - the program does use a timing calibration loop, but it doesn't handle the massive changes in instruction timings since then.

That's the one! Would it be possible for you to upload that file somewhere?

Yes, that would be great! I remember running it over and over listening to the miracle of speech through a ibm pc speaker, wondering how they did it. I also faintly remember some kind of fantasy sports game, with quirky characters kicking a ball or something (it's very vague at this point), which had the most amazing (to me at the time) polyphonic music coming out of this simple speaker on its title screen. I've been looking for that HELPME-file and the title of this game for years.

Sure, no problem. http://www.sheetlightning.net/temp/helpme.zip

Thanks so much! Looking forward to the memory trip! Wish I still had my IBM PC XT to run it on, but DOSBOX should do...

It worked! Thanks again. It's also playable in Audacity at ~4000hz sampling rate...

The classic Mac text to speech used to have an Easter egg that said something like "I sure like being inside this fancy computer".

It's still there in OS X! Go to System Preferences -> Dictation & Speech, change your voice to Fred or Bruce and press Play to test the sound. The different voices say different phrases.

I don't remember that bootdisk, but there was Inertia Player that could play mod files on the PC-Honker.

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=29208

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