The thing that made the PC speaker so unbearable for me was the inability to change the volume - 6am family PC gaming was NOT okay if I woke everyone up with beeps and bloops.
DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
41–50 of 81 posts
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#42id Software should have just partnered with a heavy metal band that jointly released an album of Doom music you could put in your stereo while you play the game.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#43Nice website design
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#44I once saw a C64 disk drive 1541 play the US national anthem by moving the floppy drive head across the disk in patterns to produce mechanical noise which vould be interpreted as a melody/tune. So a combination of a cheap built in speaker and a floppy disk could have produced stereo sound!!!!
Meanwhile, 8 year old Amigas were playing 12 bit digital stereo sound on 4 channels … on a preemptive multitasking system on a machine with less RAM and a < 8Mhz CPU.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#45One 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...
I recall having "Pinball Dreams" also similar (same?) tech - the soundtrack through the speaker was quite good!
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#46One 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...
Fascinating. It sounds awesome!
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#47I’ve got a question to all of the people who had PCs back then, were audio cards that expensive that it wasn’t worth just buying one if you had any interest in gaming?
Just doing a little research it was like $80 - $100 to add it.
I do remember back then that the motto was for PCs that “the computer wanted was always $2000”.
My first time having an x86 PC was in 1994 when I bought the 486DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card for my PowerMac 6100/60. It had a SoundBlaster daughtercard.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#48One 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...
Fascinating. It sounds awesome! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=havf3yw0qyw
I’ve had this music in my head for 30+ years. I could never get very far in the game though!
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#49id Software should have just partnered with a heavy metal band that jointly released an album of Doom music you could put in your stereo while you play the game.
That's what Sigil did with Buckethead, in a way.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#50While this is a wonderful technical feat, I think it's not nearly as playable. The video shows that it doesn't mix the gameplay sounds with the music track, so it pauses the music every time to play a sound (gun shot, door opening, item pick up, etc). This is really distracting compared to the adlib driver that mixes them together and so the music doesn't stop/start harshly. And IIRC, the adlib music is quieter then…
As someone who grew up on PC speaker, it's actually really good. The main thing is the item sound effects need some tweaking to be less distracting, probably just shorter. It might also do good to just skip certain unimportant sound effects completely.
As someone who also grew up on PC speaker, I think it sounds significantly worse than Wolfenstein 3D's PC speaker sound where it of course would be expected to be better than Wolf3D in every way.
I think they could have made something a lot better by, like Wolf, dropping music entirely from the PC speaker implementation. Focus on the sounds that matter.