Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.
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DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#22Not 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.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#23Not 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.
I remember this driver and relied on it for a few years. Was sort of amazing, all things considered.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#24This 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…
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
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#25One 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...
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#26Is anyone here old enough to remember Access Software and their RealSound[0] tech? For a short time I thought that was going to be as good as it gets for PCs, until I got my first Sound Blaster (8 bit)
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#27Sounds like a 3D Commander Keen.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#28One 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...
Except those #$!@# patented it. We were doing the same thing before them even going back to the Apple II. I described it to my father and he said it was an obvious technique.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#29Interesting title, but folks seem to forget the double-digit MHz processors straining to hit 30 FPS back then on Doom unless it was in a smaller rendering size. This would have killed the performance even on my mighty 486 running at 33 MHz at the time (I don't have a lot of faith in the VM demo). It remains to be seen if the music files are small enough to keep the game to its original ~2 x 1.44MB installation disk size.
Still neat.
I recall Windows 3.1 was sometimes shipped with a speaker driver that could emulate a very basic audio card on a traditional PC speaker almost entirely in software.
Re: DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
#30One 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...
"Can't be too happy about that one!" I always loved the speech in World Class Leader Board Golf!