I'm back to spam you. Got some love for totally monophonic square wave?

PC Speaker was one of earliest and most primitive sound devices of personal computers, intended to produce very basic system beeps. It is only capable to play single voice of square wave without any volume or timbre control.This album reveals some hidden potential of this little device that remained pretty much unexplored due to rapid progress in the computer technology back in the day.


https://shiru8bit.bandcamp.com/album/system-beeps

https://youtu.be/tUy1MEpqbvk


Besides the music itself, you can also have all the tools and project files to learn how it was made and to do something similar (follow links in the descriptions). In short, it is all done in a modern DAW, Reaper, using my custom VSTi's.

cool idea and it sounds surprisingly good

Comeback of the year imo, nice to see you here again!
Awesome work. I was always thinking of making music for pc speaker, but never managed to get further writing simple synth in c. Can't wait to test it on my old pc!!

Should also spam a bit about Planet X3 game by The 8-Bit Guy (also of The 8-Bit Keys fame). Helped him with sound code, and developed an actual MS-DOS tracker for PC Speaker with similar capabilities, as he preffered it to be the oldschool way rather than the modern DAW one. I don't know for sure, but hopefully he'll get it released to the public sometime. Here is a bit of old info (the game is out by now): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1973096722/planet-x3-for-ms-dos/posts/2254405

it's suprisingly awesome. I knew it would be good but I'm enjoying it more than I thought.

Wrote an in-depth 'making of' article: https://habr.com/en/post/439192/

These are good songs!

Do you know much about the PC speaker in the Dell Latitude you're using? It sounds high-quality, almost like the emulated kind found in modern laptops.

This is fucking fantastic wtf

VirtualMan, this laptop also has a sound card (ESS1888 based if I'm not mistaken, OPL3 sounds a little bit weird), and it shares the same single loudspeaker between the sound card and PC Speaker. The loudspeaker is not of great quality, but better than ones that usually would be used for a standalone PC Speaker.

I read that in hackaday first and then here. What a wonderful writeup that was.

Thanks for the info, Shiru, and congrats on the Hackaday write-up.