What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#61

Post by 45h34jh53k4j » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

rzzzt wrote: post #50

kubiiii wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat (maybe) related : another world from Éric Chahi used to support the pc speaker as sound output, and had digitized sound effects and voices (very low quality but still incredible).

The PC port of Pinball Fantasies could also play MOD music through the internal speaker fairly nicely. My personal favorite is still the "Magic Mushroom" disk, which played the audio part of an Air-O-Zone air freshener commercial, all in 360K. :)

hey. your story intrigued me, so i found it and hosted it somewhere more free. Its quite rare these days. It doesn't work in Dosbox on OSX unfortunately so I couldn't see it.

This is: echo Magic Mushroom Echo -------------- echo This Program was made by the R&D Team at echo the Cleveland Corp. of Australia at Hendra echo To turn 'Magic Mushroom off press any key echo Bye,Bye,Bye

virus total scan (its clean): https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/34b703cace0a2464899c67fa1...

Because its so small (206K), it fits in a pastebin: curl http://pastebin.com/raw/D95mhEvE | base64 -D > mushroom.zip

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#62

Post by vertex-four » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:28 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #59

ChuckMcM wrote: post #30

That is a pretty awesome tour de force. Somewhere deep inside your computer is an (emulated) PC/AT trying to get out :-). An interesting lesson about the use of 'beep' for the assistive technologies. I see those sorts of things in architectures which have grown up over time and I wonder whether or not you could know at the time "Hey we're using this weird thing, please deprecated at your earliest convenience" or if i…

> Also an interesting take on how much Microsoft has had to unwind in a compatible way over the years. It's very much self-inflicted technical debt. From a Spolsky on Software article from 2004: > Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows…

Hey cool, SimCity had the Heartbleed bug.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#63

Post by wyager » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:35 PM UTC

>It turns out that they couldn’t. And the answer to why they couldn’t came from a totally unexpected place. The American’s with Disabilities Act.

I wonder how much this act has cost society. Just in this particular instance, let's say keeping this chip on PC motherboards adds 5¢ to the cost of each motherboard. Multiply by a billion PCs sold in the last 10 years (The actual number is higher, but maybe some don't have the chip. Macs and stuff.). Did having the PC beep provide $50M worth of utility to society over the last ten years? I doubt it. $50M of research into e.g. sight restoration technology would also likely have been more useful to blind people in general.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#64

Post by 0x0 » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:53 PM UTC

vertex-four wrote: post #62

vanderZwan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also an interesting take on how much Microsoft has had to unwind in a compatible way over the years. It's very much self-inflicted technical debt. From a Spolsky on Software article from 2004: > Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows…

Hey cool, SimCity had the Heartbleed bug.

Using memory after it's freed isn't really Heartbleed. That would instead be sending uninitialized (but not currently freed) memory over the network.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#65

Post by 0x0 » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #58

dfox wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On first few AMD's original AMD64 microarchitectures, 16 bit segments (both vm86 and 16b protected mode) were not working when the CPU was in long mode. The fact that they do on many modern CPUs is one of the Intel's extensions to AMD64. Also this is the reason why 64b windows do not support NTVDM and 16b windows applications, while the current hardware can support that. Another of these backward compatibility Intel'…

But you can leave long mode with a couple instructions. Was that not possible at some point? A good old triple fault should always work, shouldn't it?

This discussion is interesting, I had read earlier that long mode was a point of no return, I guess that's not true after all?

I guess no v86 mode still makes it a dealbreaker for NTVDM type applications. Nobody wants to go back to a windows 95 style OS where a 16bit application runs unprotected and can stomp over anything and bring the machine to a halt. (For example, in win95 you could run debug.com and overwrite the first blocks of physical memory with zeros, which would immediately crash everything since that's where interrupt vectors like the IRQ timer is stored)

Would it be possible to bounce from 64bit long mode to 16bit real mode with some trusted code that bounces on to a mini kernel in 32bit protected mode that hosts v86 16bit applications, and then back again?

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#66

Post by hexwab » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 11:37 PM UTC

45h34jh53k4j wrote: post #61

rzzzt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC port of Pinball Fantasies could also play MOD music through the internal speaker fairly nicely. My personal favorite is still the "Magic Mushroom" disk, which played the audio part of an Air-O-Zone air freshener commercial, all in 360K. :)

hey. your story intrigued me, so i found it and hosted it somewhere more free. Its quite rare these days. It doesn't work in Dosbox on OSX unfortunately so I couldn't see it. This is: echo Magic Mushroom Echo -------------- echo This Program was made by the R&D Team at echo the Cleveland Corp. of Australia at Hendra echo To turn 'Magic Mushroom off press any key echo Bye,Bye,Bye virus total scan (its clean): https://…

It may not work in dosbox, but mushroom.ovl is just raw 8-bit[1] linear audio sampled at 8kHz so you can load it up in your raw-audio-capable app of choice. On linux try "aplay mushroom.ovl", for example.

[1] Actually only 6 bits per byte are used; presumably this was done to improve decoding speed or something.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#67

Post by godzillabrennus » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 11:53 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #39

Yhippa wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly that but a similar story for you. I was a huge dork in high school and figured out the sound API on my HP-48G which was just really a way to play a sound from the internal speaker at a frequency and duration. I programmed the first parts of Holst's Jupiter using my calculator and a friend's calculator. Man that was real fun to do. Created an API on top of that to simplify it to play notes at a certain len…

I did something similar with an Arduino. I managed to get an okay Star Wars out of it. As for calculators, my school unfortunately standardized in TI: You guys had RPL, we have TI-Basic, which is worse than actual BASIC. And our calculators cost more! (Second-hand, anyways, because let's face it, nobody buys their calculators new)

I like to think my TI-83+ from 15 years ago is still being used by some kid who bought it off some kid who bought it off some kid who's the guy that bought it off me when I finished college.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#68

Post by corysama » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 11:55 PM UTC

kubiiii wrote: post #45

jordache wrote: post #2

Anyone else remember that driver that allowed the internal speaker to output wave sound? I remember days of playing SimCity 2000 and Doom without a sound card, so it was just beeps and buzzes. Then one day I discovered that driver and started to enjoy small sounding wave sound

Somewhat (maybe) related : another world from Éric Chahi used to support the pc speaker as sound output, and had digitized sound effects and voices (very low quality but still incredible).

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Spelljammer_-_Pirates_of_R... had full music and sound effects through PC speaker. Very low quality, yes. But, it was amazingly close to the merely low quality audio of most PC games of the time even when you did have a sound card.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#69

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 12:27 AM UTC

0x0 wrote: post #65

Dylan16807 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can leave long mode with a couple instructions. Was that not possible at some point? A good old triple fault should always work, shouldn't it?

This discussion is interesting, I had read earlier that long mode was a point of no return, I guess that's not true after all? I guess no v86 mode still makes it a dealbreaker for NTVDM type applications. Nobody wants to go back to a windows 95 style OS where a 16bit application runs unprotected and can stomp over anything and bring the machine to a halt. (For example, in win95 you could run debug.com and overwrite t…

I heard that too, but then I actually looked at the manual, and it's very simple to both enter and exit long mode.

As far as I know it's possible to do all that and have a very-mixed OS.

Re: What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)

#70

Post by int_19h » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 12:32 AM UTC

jordache wrote: post #2

Anyone else remember that driver that allowed the internal speaker to output wave sound? I remember days of playing SimCity 2000 and Doom without a sound card, so it was just beeps and buzzes. Then one day I discovered that driver and started to enjoy small sounding wave sound

There were some DOS games that had that baked in. Here's one example from 1987 (!), that used CGA graphics. They couldn't really spare the processing power during the game itself, so they kept it for the intro and the main menu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yL-u7lsMxk