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DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

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Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#51

Post by [deleted] »

jasongill wrote: post #24
minki_the_avali wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the design aspect really wasn't something I had considered, It definitively does make a lot of sense. Still sad though that it didn't officially happen. So far, all the arguments I had seen against it where purely about the performance, which in my testing isn't really a big factor for this.

Doom is playable (albeit by reducing the viewport to a postage stamp) on a 386; I'd be curious how your patch works on the 386 considering how much worse the graphics performance is on it

[deleted]

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#52

Post by antonvs »

minki_the_avali wrote: post #10
minki_the_avali wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend had suggested it after I was struggling to come up with a suitable title and there sadly isn't a way to edit it after the fact.

nvm, found the option in phpBB to change it

The new title may still be misleading. Have you tested this on MS-DOS with 1993 hardware?

On Linux, `sndserver` is a separate process. On MS-DOS, it was not. On DOS, priority mixing would have to happen e.g. within Doom's tick processing or in the sound interrupt handler.

If you're just making these changes in Linux and assuming they could have worked in 1993, you're just cosplaying.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#53

Post by EvanAnderson »

nine_k wrote: post #39
suprjami wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know. Experiencing that made me learn about PWM, and I was able to reproduce, harshly, a voice sample on my 2 MHz 8-bit home computer, by bit-banging the tape recorder port's 1-bit output.

I did this on an Apple IIe years before I had a sound card on my PC (or a sampler for my Amiga). It seemed so cool to me, even if I didn't exactly understand how it worked.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#54

Post by EvanAnderson »

suprjami wrote: post #25

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...

An example of how RealSound sounded: https://youtu.be/havf3yw0qyw

Edit:

This sent me down a rabbit hole and I found this nice video about PC speaker history: https://youtu.be/jD4m9JvLy2Y

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#55

Post by wzdd »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #47

I’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 Car…

If you're 12 years old and it's the family computer (which I suspect was a not-insignificant part of the target market), you've also got to negotiate opening it up and sticking in a circuit board, adding drivers (and thus becoming prime suspect in every subsequent Windows crash), and finding some way of actually vibrating the air, which at the very least involves buying desk speakers and negotiating space on a desk which might not be your own.

Also you don't have $100.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#56

Post by krige »

nine_k wrote: post #34
suprjami wrote: post #25

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…

Fast Tracker 2, admittedly "bit" later than 1990, could route playback of however many channels you used to the speaker.

Worth noting that the quality in these cases was pretty good. A bit staticky but still well above Wolfenstein 3D sound effects most people associate with PC Speaker (covox-less).

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#57

Post by [deleted] »

moepstar wrote: post #45
suprjami wrote: post #25

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...

I recall having "Pinball Dreams" also similar (same?) tech - the soundtrack through the speaker was quite good!

[deleted]

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#58

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

wzdd wrote: post #55
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #47

I’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 Car…

If you're 12 years old and it's the family computer (which I suspect was a not-insignificant part of the target market), you've also got to negotiate opening it up and sticking in a circuit board, adding drivers (and thus becoming prime suspect in every subsequent Windows crash), and finding some way of actually vibrating the air, which at the very least involves buying desk speakers and negotiating space on a desk w…

I honestly didn’t think about the “needing external speakers part”.

The motherboard on the Mac had an internal audio input slot you connected the CD player to for audio CD playback. You also connected the DOS card’s SoundBlaster daughtercard directly to the motherboard and you could play PC sounds directly through the Mac speaker.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#59

Post by roryirvine »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #47

I’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 Car…

They started to be included by default for home PCs in around 1992, with the rise of Multimedia - PCs were advertised on the basis on being able to play 8fps 192x144 video clips from the Encarta or Grolier CD-ROMs that they were inevitably bundled with.

Before that, there really wasn't much else you could do with them other than games. The original Soundblasters were fairly crap - mono 11kHz 8 bit sound - so they weren't exactly hifi. There was better kit available for professional use from the likes of Gravis and Turtle Beach, but the price put them out of reach for most home users.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#60

Post by hanslub42 »

My first PC (in 1993) ran on Linux (0.99). As it didn't have a sound card I used the PC speaker as one. It sounded very tinny but speech was understandable enough. Even in the newest kernels there is a driver (https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/SND_PCSP.html) that exposes the speaker as an ALSA device. For sentimental reasons I will enable it next time I compile my kernel, though I don't expect much: the PC speaker is even more of an afterthought now than it was 33 years ago, and may even be a piezoelectric "buzzer" instead of a speaker with a coil and a paper cone.
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