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DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

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Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#61

Post by jvolkman »

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

In the Doom-era game Rise of the Triad, if you shrink the viewport all the way down to postage stamp size, it displays "Buy a 486!" underneath.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#62

Post by consp »

Suppafly wrote: post #40
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 don't remember which software I used, I don't specifically recall it being realsound, but I had a soundblaster emulator driver that used the pc speaker that wasn't half bad. Got me through hours of Kings Quest and Space Quest. I also used a driver that made the computer think my monochrome monitor had CGA capabilities.

Wasn't the last one mainly to use Hercules cards in cga only applications?

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#63

Post by Ekaros »

jasongill wrote: post #4

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…

I think the video really shows that something is "aesthetically"(or audio equivalent) lost. Lot is fine and even good. But there is lack of certain guttural feel that game has.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#64

Post by vidarh »

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.

You could play music on the C64 by sampling the tape ports 1bit input and twiddling the sound chips volume accordingly.

You could of course store the samples too, to play back later, but doing realtime sampling into 64KB of RAM didn't exactly let you store much... And a 1MHz CPU didn't let you do much compression if you wanted to keep up..

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#65

Post by minki_the_avali »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #22

Not bad. I recall a special Windows 3 driver could push sound effects and music through PC speakers, at least those which were an actual small speaker embedded in the case. It was very rough and mono but a neat trick. I don't think it worked with the coin sized beepers in older models.

Used that before, Its basically software PWM and moving the mouse messes with it. There is an equivalent in Linux called snd-pcsp which can be modprobed in case no sound card exists. It has the same issues though

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#66

Post by burnt-resistor »

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

DOOM was playable on the 486SLC2 with a modestly smaller viewport despite having just a 16-bit bus. It was the one donated IBM box in my high school's computer lab that could play it because Model 25 and 30 286's sure couldn't.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#67

Post by burnt-resistor »

jvolkman wrote: post #61
jasongill wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In the Doom-era game Rise of the Triad, if you shrink the viewport all the way down to postage stamp size, it displays "Buy a 486!" underneath.

ROTT is in my childhood's "badass games hall of fame" along with Quarantine (aka Death Throttle aka Hard Rock Cab), Abuse, and Stratosphere. Honorable mention: Microsoft Flight Simulator: Aircraft & Scenery Designer (MFSASD) for the ability to make an almost flyable U-2 from the jet plane.

dipstick gunfinity burnme

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#69

Post by burnt-resistor »

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…

Must've been an Am386 or OC since the 33 MHz part was the fastest Intel 386DX.

Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music

#70

Post by aa-jv »

One of my first audio dev jobs was to add Creative Labs AWE32 support to a game called "Spectre VR", which at the time was one of the most popular multi-player/networked games for PC's.

It was, literally, a blast. The AWE32 was basically a sampler on a card, for PC's, and it was CL/Velocity's intention to bundle SpectreVR with the AWE32 for release. SpectreVR had a PC-Speaker driver, which was .. viable .. if you had the processing power for it. But AWE32 support just kicked serious ass, so it was a major push to get it working.

We got it working, it was hilariously fun, and the upgrade in audio had everyone in the office clamoring for the limited AWE32's we'd been allocated for development.

Then, DOOM hit the 'net, and everyone moved on, really fast, from SpectreVR, and it wasn't long until the bundling deal came undone, and DOOM got the AWE32 treatment instead. That was a frustrating state of affairs, but at least I got a free AWE32 out of it ..

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