CAMBOD.MOD played through PC Speaker

[Lachlant1984]

I wonder how this would sound on newer motherboards which have the little piezoelectric beepers that are usually very quiet and sound very much like cheap electronic handheld games from the 80's. Those 'PC speakers' aren't much good at all really.

[Robloxian182]

This is not the pc speaker that i was expecting......but it's still good!

[ratix98]

pinball fantasies allowed the music and sfx be played through the pc speaker surprisingly well

[1337Shockwav3]

The bottleneck with outputting stuff on the PC Speaker is well ... the speaker and the CPU :P Otherwise the software is pretty much doing what your soundcard usually would do ;)

Writing that, I just played back by first MP3 using a covox :)

[Samoutuomas]

@1337Shockwav3 Actually, I have to disagree here (or maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you mean)? It's the "beeper-speaker" that's making these sounds on this video. It can only produce a single beep at a time, at different hertzes (300-10000 range or something) and with different lenghts. That has never changed in PC's.. Even modern ones have one, unless it's left out on purpose. I think it's the same beep you hear when you turn your computer on. So this is quite an accomplishment.

[SiD3WiNDR]

@Samoutuomas What 1337Shockwav3 is saying is that basically the CPU is now doing what the DAC in your soundcard, changing the audio data into speaker pulses... I first had this experience with a cracktro, don't remember what it was for, but my jaw fell to the ground. Afterwards indeed Inertia Player could do this - I think Impulse Tracker as well... but it does indeed take a lot of CPU.

Inertia player rocked btw, nice visualisation as well :)

[od090]

The back side of that jackplug can be a simple DAC on a pc speaker wire? A kind of COVOX i presume. :-)

[JeremyPassarelli]

Were do I get the program from? Does it play mp3 and AU files?

[vwestlife]

@JeremyPassarelli Just look up "Inertia Player". It does not play MP3 or AU files.

[1337Shockwav3Games]

Props for using inertia players :)

I still use that one on and off wehen testing the stereo covox I built.

[gmodfan11]

not as good as the normal PC bleeper! i prefer the normal.

[AndreR241]

You have an idea how I can DosBox make using my "real" PC speaker instead of the emulation?

[vwestlife]

@AndreR241 Sorry, I don't use emulators, so I can't help you there.

[AndreR241]

@vwestlife Oh, that was the actual PC speaker beeping?

[vwestlife]

@AndreR241 Yes. I used a Compaq laptop and captured the audio from its line-out jack. That way the quality is much better than holding a microphone up to the little built-in speaker, but either way it is the PC speaker circuitry producing the audio.

[BansheeFriend]

@AndreR241 I believe VMWare Workstation can send calls to pc speaker.

[bhtooefr]

What are the specs of the PC used to generate this? Just to get an idea of how much power is needed to bitbang the PC squeaker at that high quality.

[vwestlife]

@bhtooefr I did it on a Compaq Pentium III laptop, but I remember PC speaker output working just as well on a 386SX-33. The sampling rate is 22 kHz.

[CptTuttle]

Inertia player :D

Real nostalgia for me! :D

[SgtSavage166]

I can't stop hitting Replay :D

[Keijz74]

DOSBOX emulates the PC speaker using the soundcard. Which makes the sound a bit fuller. And you can record and edit sounds which can be fun. And now old Dos games also have volume control which is nice too.

[dushanostoich]

the problem las from my PC speaker and my by from my PC ,because i change the speaker and it sounds bether ,but it stil have an annoying clikering sound ,it sounds even i mute the music , but when i stom music file this sound stops too

[dushanostoich]

what kind of file types this player supports ?

[vwestlife]

Amiga .MOD, .S3M, .669, .MTM and a few other types.

[dushanostoich]

10x . :) can uoy tell me from where to dawnload your file " CAMBOD.MOD" because I try other MOD filen and they sound too bad .

[dushanostoich]

cool I did not know that PC spiker can do that :)!!! I will try this!

[HeinrichPL]

Where can i find IPlayer? I was trying by google... No results :(

[vwestlife]

Look up its full name: "Inertia Player"

[Membrane556]

I seen similar tricks done on an Apple II where they simulate a 4bit dac via PCM.

[pecam5]

yeah, as long as you're not dealing w/bass sounds you're ok...

[Kumagoro314]

Search for Inertia Player, it's the full name of Iplay

[Amishman35]

I had a Tandy 386 PC which I used to play the music out through the PC speaker. It had a jack which was connected to the internal PC honker. On another note, that PC *refused* to run Windows, generating general protection faults before the Program Manager would come up even from a clean install on a freshly formatted hard drive with nothing in the ISA slots. Tandy PCs are like canoe-beer, effin near water.

[zxspectrum128]

I don't have any trouble believing it. I've seen the MSX people achieving music with similar quality, and I'm talking about a Z80 processor running at less than 4Mhz.

[richardbirch2007]

dayumm! i remember this app i got it from a pc format cd from 1996 it also had the pandora directive demo ahh good times

[BrugmansiaNoncorpus]

i cannot find iplay on google

[m1omg]

Also, the output of the built-in beeper (without headphone or external speakers tweak) is MUCH lower quality than this, and anyway, it can achieve resolution of 6 bits max.

[vwestlife]

Anyone who doubts this was played through the PC speaker can download IPlay and try it themselves. Just do a Google search for IPlay, it'll come up. It defaults to Sound Blaster, but using ISetup you can change it to the "PC Honker".

[m1omg]

lol i do not doubt, but this is the PC Speaker SIGNAL, not an output of beeper recorded with a microphone the internal speaker is much lower quality this is the signal from pc speaker

[vwestlife]

Many modern computers, especially laptops, route the PC speaker sounds through the same output as the sound card, so you can use the speakers or headphones of your choice. Of course if your computer is limited to a tiny piezo beeper on the motherboard for producing the PC speaker sounds, the quality will be much less!

[m1omg]

Well yeah, but then it is not the real PC speaker, I know how a real non piezo  PC speaker sounds, I had digisound MOD player on my old 386 that used it.

[bjeah]

I was lucky enough to have an IBM PS/2 50z 286 PC. They had quite big PC-speakers. :)

[SkyCharger001]

The quality of the beeper depends on the driver-signal, there are three timers available for generating this signal, if you set one of these to produce the driver-signal at 1/x-th of the CPU-clock the quality will become dependent on the CPU's speed.

If played at 8KHz with an 8 MHz CPU, then a 16MHz CPU (no other differences) should play it at 16KHz (with possible volume dithering)

[Muffincakeswithsugar]

holy shit

[gthreek]

I have real trouble believing this is being played through a standard bleeper.

[sabrejack2]

Believe it. I had another .mod player that did the same thing back in those days. I was amazed.

[m1omg]

nice, but in reality the pc speaker sound seems very quiet when it plays digital files, is there any way to louden the sound on a real pc speaker?