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playing a wav on a pc speaker O_o
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 5:38 pm
by Dreglor
just out of curiosity could you play a wav on the pc speaker without too much distortion?
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 7:48 pm
by blueznl
no
though there were some funny drivers for that a long time ago
if you have a compaq deskpro or something similar, the soundcard is hooked up to the on board speaker with it's own volume control, gotta love that
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 7:51 pm
by Karbon
Which begs the questions.. Does anyone remember the program called "tran" that was text-to-voice in the PC speaker?
Good stuff!
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 8:10 pm
by Dreglor
not even with the _beep command?
having the thought of the pc speaker doing such things is a intresting though
Re: playing a wav on a pc speaker O_o
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 8:39 pm
by GPI
Dreglor wrote:just out of curiosity could you play a wav on the pc speaker without too much distortion?
Why?
When a PC hasn't a soundcard, you should by a new PC, because your PC is very, very old.
PC-Speaker is for BIOS-Error-Messages.
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 11:10 pm
by Dreglor
i was wondering, i didn't think i could use it for anything
Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 2:21 am
by TronDoc
Karbon wrote:Which begs the questions.. Does anyone remember the program called "tran" that was text-to-voice in the PC speaker?
Good stuff!
yes, I have it [tran] here somewhere, along with
the .wav speaker driver...
...both worked quite well.
Joe
Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 8:33 am
by thefool
the pc-speaker isnt for bios errors only. i remember an old danish made game, where even voice was coming trough the pc speaker. difficult to hear, though..
Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 6:53 pm
by Dreglor
there are motherboards that do boot up and say "Self-test Ok"
and the voice isn't to bad
Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 7:15 pm
by Brice Manuel
Quote:
just out of curiosity could you play a wav on the pc speaker without too much distortion?
You might get the old Microsoft Speaker Driver to work (and sound was fairly good for back then), but it is a 16bit solution and may not work anymore under newer Windows versions.
Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 7:52 pm
by GPI
thefool wrote:the pc-speaker isnt for bios errors only. i remember an old danish made game, where even voice was coming trough the pc speaker. difficult to hear, though..
Yes Old. Today PC-Speaker is for bios-errors. When you want sound, use a soundcard. All other is waste of time.
We live in the year 2004, not 1986.
Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 11:13 pm
by Dreglor
but what if were stuck in 1986
Posted: Mon May 31, 2004 9:53 am
by thefool
we just program us out of 1986. or make a soundcard
Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2004 8:46 pm
by Nelligan
It can be fun for some people to tinker on old tech things and I don't think they find it a waste of time or at least a fun one
Some drivers here :
http://ulihansen.kicks-ass.net/speaker/index2.htm
Oh and I just remembered, Alone in the dark on my VGA 286's PC speaker was great!!
Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2004 8:42 am
by Amiga5k
Hard to believe, but the original Apple 2 (I think) only allowed the speaker to make a quick click sound. If you wanted to make a note, you had to turn the click on and off at a certain rate (higher rates = higher notes, etc). And, believe it or not, some companies actually figured out how to create speech using this approach! (Luckily, a real sound card eventually made its way into the Apple line).
On this same note (pardon the pun), there was a program I remember from the Commodore 64 days that would tap the 1541's (floppy disk) drive head up against the head stop and actually play a song! Not good for the drive head, I'm sure, but still impressive.
It's amazing what programmers can do when given a challenge. Programmers of today have it W A A A A Y too easy in comparison (ultra cheap memory, high speed processors, high level languages and libraries that all but do it for you...). Back then, if you had 64k, 1mhz and a 6502\10 assembler you had it made.... This is why most of the classic games of all time were created during this period.
Just my $.02
Russell