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PC Speaker To Eleven

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Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the same used in the 8088 mph demo productions end credits? https://youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

Reminded me of Mean Streets, with it's RealSound[1] voices https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4?t=153 Was amazed when I heard it for the first time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound

And having now read the article I see it mentions RealSound, albeit not Mean Streets. The digitized speech was something else when I heard it. Game too, for that matter.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#22

Although the engineering behind getting a good sound out of the PC speaker is fascinating. Still wishing the PC standard from the get go had included sound as a first class citizen. I think this decision back then still ripples through the machines today and sound never truly feels like an integral part of the machine on Windows (Realtek audio driver) and you'll never have the feeling of a built in boot sound on your…

"[...]a built in boot sound on your machine which felt so good on Macs[...]"

Ever since I got my first iBook in college I've had mainly negative associations with that sound. Too frequently you'd open the thing in the middle of a lecture with 100+ people in the room and the sound starts blasting. The only solution I found was plugging in headphones so that the sound would go there instead.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#23
Damn this takes me back. I'm 10 years old and my 'gaming setup' is my mom's 386 work computer. No sound card, so I played and completed games like Doom I, Chip's Challenge (built-in w/ Win 3.1 I believe) and Allan Border's Cricket with those beeps and boops.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#24

Although the engineering behind getting a good sound out of the PC speaker is fascinating. Still wishing the PC standard from the get go had included sound as a first class citizen. I think this decision back then still ripples through the machines today and sound never truly feels like an integral part of the machine on Windows (Realtek audio driver) and you'll never have the feeling of a built in boot sound on your…

CoreAudio on the Mac is so good. I've never had to install any drivers for USB or Firewire interfaces and the latency is incredible compared to the same setup on a PC.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#25
post #17
post #15

to learn assembly I wrote a "PC speaker clicker" that just strobed the click register and had a small timing loop to play A440. A person in the room spoke up when I played it- "that's not A440, it's off slightly. Oh, and I have perfect pitch- it's about 439". I had a small bug in my timing routine that made the pitch slightly lower, which I fixed.

I sang in a children’s choir growing up. There were several kids with perfect pitch over the years. It’s an incredible skill; they really do get the pitch exactly right - even better than the piano.

Makes you wonder what the difference is, genetically speaking. The one set of genes codes for a crystal oscillator and the other for resistors and capacitors or the biological equivalent.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#26

Although the engineering behind getting a good sound out of the PC speaker is fascinating. Still wishing the PC standard from the get go had included sound as a first class citizen. I think this decision back then still ripples through the machines today and sound never truly feels like an integral part of the machine on Windows (Realtek audio driver) and you'll never have the feeling of a built in boot sound on your…

"[...]a built in boot sound on your machine which felt so good on Macs[...]" Ever since I got my first iBook in college I've had mainly negative associations with that sound. Too frequently you'd open the thing in the middle of a lecture with 100+ people in the room and the sound starts blasting. The only solution I found was plugging in headphones so that the sound would go there instead.

As I recall, if you muted the sound before shutting down it would stay muted and not play the startup sound. My Mac experience starts at the white iBook G3 running OSX 10.2 though, so it could be that this behaviour is a new thing.

I now have a 13" TouchBar MacBook Pro and it makes a sound when I plug the charger in no matter what I do to the volume settings. When I have it muted and open I can actually see it unmute the sound so that it can make the charger sound then mute it again when it's done.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#27

I remember playing a Golf game called World Class Leaderboard on my 386 and being absolutely amazed by the sound coming out of my PC speaker. It used RealSound to play the sounds of birds on the title screen and realistic golf sound effects and voices during gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21a_bbajmjQ

And the original Links (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5TPAxMfpbQ) from the same company. Really nice use of the PC speaker in the intro, as well as the game.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#28

The most amazing thing I've heard done with a PC speaker is in the last part of this equally amazing demo (starts at 6:37 --- the parts before have more "normal" beeper music): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y Explanation here: https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how...

Holy shit. I've never heard anything even remotely like that from a pc speaker. How the hell did they accomplish that on a 1981 pc?!?!

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#29
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sang in a children’s choir growing up. There were several kids with perfect pitch over the years. It’s an incredible skill; they really do get the pitch exactly right - even better than the piano.

Makes you wonder what the difference is, genetically speaking. The one set of genes codes for a crystal oscillator and the other for resistors and capacitors or the biological equivalent.

This is a really interesting area of research. I've been following roughly since the time I wrote the code I described above (at UCSF, a medical research institution). At the time, my genetics professor (Nelson Friemer) theorized it was primarily genetic (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090702170209.h...) and even found some genetic associations.

I don't think that's really super-important. For example, when he heard that perfect pitch was frequently found in children of musicians, his conclusion is that it was inherited genetically. I think, instead, children of musicians are exposed to pitches and their labels (notes) very early, during neural plasticity, and develop the mental associations, probably with some assist from genetics.

The biophysics of audition are pretty interesting; see http://dailynexus.com/2017-08-24/hearing-a-biophysical-and-n...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_cell

One could imagine any number of genetic changes that could affect the ability of the physical system (these parts) as well as the neural parts to do this, but personally I think this is much more learned behavior, not genetically dominated.

Re: PC Speaker To Eleven

#30
post #28

The most amazing thing I've heard done with a PC speaker is in the last part of this equally amazing demo (starts at 6:37 --- the parts before have more "normal" beeper music): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y Explanation here: https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how...

Holy shit. I've never heard anything even remotely like that from a pc speaker. How the hell did they accomplish that on a 1981 pc?!?!

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