31–40 of 81 posts
Amazing .mod based techno music via pc speaker that mixed in sound effects, even including short vocal clips (pkunk insults). All running on a humble 286 which played the game well while managing this. For those that say this was a choice due to poor pc speaker quality the toys for bob engineers pulled it off with incredible results years prior.
It was just a pain to do.
This is a cool technical feat, but I am almost sure that id attempted this and realized that it just was not ever going to sound very good. The PC speaker sound effects are bad enough (which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad") and sound "cheap", and adding beep-speaker music on top of that would just result in a noisy mess - as evidenced by the video. The beep-speaker music in Commander Keen was good a…
That's when I first became enamoured with the "art of the possible" and this has driven my career.
I fully believe that doom could have had pc speaker sound; after all w3d did!
One of my favourite DOS era inventions is Access Software's RealSound™ technology which performed audio modulation of the PC speaker to produce okay sounding audio playback, about telephone quality. The manual hilariously instructs you to hook your hifi system up to the PC speaker, see the last page: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS//Ma...
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.
One of my favourite DOS era inventions is Access Software's RealSound™ technology which performed audio modulation of the PC speaker to produce okay sounding audio playback, about telephone quality. The manual hilariously instructs you to hook your hifi system up to the PC speaker, see the last page: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS//Ma...
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 at…
This is a cool technical feat, but I am almost sure that id attempted this and realized that it just was not ever going to sound very good. The PC speaker sound effects are bad enough (which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad") and sound "cheap", and adding beep-speaker music on top of that would just result in a noisy mess - as evidenced by the video. The beep-speaker music in Commander Keen was good a…
They are lifted as is from Shadow Knights.
> which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad"
They could be done better or even way better, it's just that wasn't an important target in any way. Especially considering the performance target of 486DX+ whicih wasn't not a cheap machine in any way in 1993.
The original source code for DOS got reverse-engineered here: https://repo.or.cz/doom2d-restoration.git (discussion: https://doom2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2996 )
I still remember being shocked by the FX sound from my PC speaker. That was before I got enough money to buy a SoundBlaster-compatible card.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 at…
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.
One of my favourite DOS era inventions is Access Software's RealSound™ technology which performed audio modulation of the PC speaker to produce okay sounding audio playback, about telephone quality. The manual hilariously instructs you to hook your hifi system up to the PC speaker, see the last page: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS//Ma...