PCM Playback Via PC Speaker in DOS Games - NintendoComplete

[@NintendoComplete]

If you ever felt that the PC speaker's beep solely existed to annoy you, allow me to convince you otherwise: these examples of PCM playback are amazing considering how primitive the hardware is that they are playing on. There's some real talent and ingenuity on display here, that's for certain.

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

not even that bad

[@phoenixzappa7366]

This is the best video I have ever seen

[@Jdbye]

Got links to all the music in this video? I would really like to have them.

[@AnnoyedArt1256]

it's actually PWM playback and some of these examples you can faintly hear the carrier wave

[@3dmaster205]

Does this use RealSound, or is this a game that implemented its own implementation? Is it that the folks who built this, created the RealSound API later on, so game developers didn't need to figure this out on their own; and just access RealSound?

[@kryskarr23]

Just have to admire the craftsmanship of the developers to achieve this.

[@grongy6122]

Bad Cat, Mean Streets, Countdown and Crime Wave intros are examples how to make 10-second loop sound kick-ass.

[@supermasterPIK]

Ohh Crime Wave! Love tht girl. !!!

[@themegaman91965]

Whoa!! Never thought this was even possible! This reminds me of the NES playing music close to Genesis quality on games like Journey to Silius! Nice upload!

[@santiagovalentine8294]

Its on a video?

[@NintendoComplete]

Tu camarada Santiago Just look up Journey to Silius soundtrack and you'll see. It used samples for its basslines. Fester's Quest, Gremlins 2, Super Spy Hunter, and Gimmick all did too.

[@tarstarkusz]

That's because it's not in most cases. The video is not being entirely truthful. While it is true that you can create music with the speaker in this way through pulse width modulation, it is extremely processor intensive. I am not aware of any games that could play music like while you are actually playing the game and not just looking at a select screen or something. It also takes up a lot of more disk space than if you had a sound card and were hearing notes generated by the card. What it is playing is essentially a low bitrate wav file.

[@tarstarkusz]

For example, here is what hard drivin actually sounds like /watch?v=h2DUlfcSOKs

[@elpechos]

@@tarstarkusz Star Control II had great PWM pc speaker music while you played the game

[@Alianger]

4:28 Perestroika/Toppler 4:46 Bad Cat (50 Hz?) 6:36 Hard Drivin' 11:42 Pinball Fantasies 16:20 Cannon Fodder (fasttracker2) 18:08 Crusader: No Remorse (fasttracker2) 24:43 One Must Fall 2097 (fasttracker2) 26:44 Outrun 2000 (fasttracker2)

[@simone2059]

Bad Cat sounds like the first attempt of VaporWave , it's amazing

[@talgoren2246]

pinball fantasies was the only game I knew that sounded pretty much the same once I bought a sound card. I couldn't understand why other games couldn't be like it.

[@Roninkinx]

Sadly this quality didn’t appear until late in the loudspeakers life. Took a talented programmer as well to input it :(

[@ashkirby8896]

0:14 Hey, it’s the theme of Turbo Cup!😄 I remember that tune, I made a Korg Gadget cover of it last year!

[@akkudakkupl]

The magic of PCM! Also I listen to Crusader soundtrack from time to time :-)

[@maxkopfraumpoops]

JUST HOW THE HELL DID THEY ACHIEVE THIS MAGIC?! I am blown away. I remember the beeping intro of Monkey Island and this is what already blew my mind back in the day. Then I would make my own PC Speaker "music" using QBasic but this stuff is outstanding. Just how can it play PCM? How is this technically possible? And since it was possible I am starting to wonder why big studios like Lucas Arts never pulled any of this off???

[@NintendoComplete]

I imagine a lot of companies like LucasArts didnt use it too much because of the demand it put on the CPU. It required a lot of overhead to do this, and most of these come from the days of 4mhz 8088 CPUs with 256-512k of ram. Not a lot of overhead to spare on machines like that! Have you ever seen how slowly Monkey Island runs on the absolute minimum required system? O_o

[@binouche2281]

It's actually fairly easy. There are two tricks that I know of that allows it, that is, audio dithering and the smart usage of very high frequencies(Pulse-width modulation). The first is quite simple and obvious: Since the PC-Speaker is 1-bit, you can constantly feed it values and the more frequently the value is high(that is, a one), the higher the "volume" will be, allowing to simulate more possible amplitudes. Of course this requires a pretty large amount of samples per second to sound good. The other exploits the fact that the PC-Speaker takes some time to change its state. As a result, on too high frequencies, the speaker's volume will be lower. This also allows to get more possible amplitudes. Obviously, both techniques have the downfall of being very demanding. And that is probably why LucasArts and other companies never did it, because it was problematic on slow PCs. Even if all computers were of exactly the same speed, it stills really limits the time you can put on other tasks. Plus, when it comes to music, it would take a lot of space to store large tunes, unless you generate the music on the fly using some synthesis technique, but that would be even harder on processors, and... There's music cards for that.

[@wichtelchen]

This is possible with QBasic too (by accessing the hardware ports of the speaker directly).

[@setupdiscjames6110]

@@wichtelchen Yes. Even without using assembly language routines or writing directly to the speaker at 18.2 clock ticks per second with an interrupt (which you had to do to get it close to what it needed to be for the human ear to hear it as 6 bit PCM correctly on a 6mhz or higher system), you could do tricks like making a FOR/NEXT loop on Qbasic or even BASICA/GWBASIC that came close to do limited sound effects using SOUND X, 0.01 where X is a valid sound from say 1600 to 4000. You would get something that sounds like a sonic ray gun effect. I was able to use pure QBX 7.1 to playback 6 bit PCM on a 386, but for a 286 and less you had to use assembly and set the registers correctly to call the interrupt (interruptX I think was what it was). I was able to get a barely audible 4 bit PCM going on a 4.77mhz 8088 but the type of music that could even be heard with it was limited, and no graphics could be used during that demo. In fact, I had to throw data for the PC speaker to buffer to &HB800 to &HA000 which was the CGA to VGA graphics area to use that as RAM if EMS or XMS wasn't available to make it work. Fun times! ;)

[@Wichtelchen2006]

@@setupdiscjames6110 Memories^^ I think, you did something wrong ;). SOUND wasn't the way to go when it comes to PCM. It produces square waves in a given frequency and duration. And yes, it blocked the "main thread" while the sound played. Setting a specific bit (or was it an entire separate port?) switched the speaker from bleeping-mode to PCM-mode. Then you just send the 6-bit PCM samples, one by one by just bitshifting the samples from a 8-bit mono wav file, to the port. This is non-blocking. The position of the speaker cone keeps staying until you change it again. You hat to manage the correct speed/pitch by yourself. Because of that, you are still unable to do something else while the music plays :). And yes, pre-buffering into the video memory is a good idea because the floppy disk, where your sound file is, may not be fast enough. That's something you cannot do with the speaker commands. You have to use the PEEK/POKE/OUT/IN or a small precompiled assembly routine through CALL. But yes: I used the SOUND X, 0.01 + FOR-Approach a lot. Beside such experiments, I was just too lazy to make something more sophisticated. That crappy speaker cone inside the computer didn't worth it at all. It was always something like "frzfrzfzrzfzrzzzzrzrfrzfzrr-biioouuuu-sssssssssssss....". It's not a coincidence most better QBASIC games were some kind of galaxy shooters. :)

[@whytho1690]

This music is great. Thanks for making what amounts to a small archive of these tracks that would've possibly never seen the light of day again. And if you didn't know, you got mentioned in a TechLinked video. Congrats!

[@DaVince21]

I didn't know there were games around in the CGA era that did this. I remember that Golf game, though.

[@umchoyka]

"Looks like he hit a tree, Jim" That brings back memories :)

[@metalcoola]

It was too loud, that was my main complain about PC Speaker, if you wanted to play at night, good luck :)

[@NintendoComplete]

metalcoola Hahaha I remember staying up late when I wasn't supposed to to play and scrambling when the sound would start to not wake anyone up

[@coondogtheman]

@@NintendoComplete I did the same thing, Playing DOOM on a school night while trying to not wake up my parents in the next room. I was lucky enough to have a computer with a PC speaker where you could unplug the speaker from the Mobo if you didn't want sound. I eventually got a multimedia kit and then just used headphones plugged into my PC. Fun times. 97-99

[@Synthematix]

fit a 47k volume poteniomer to it.

[@NintendoComplete]

@@coondogtheman That's certainly convenient. I had a Tandy 1000TX, so it had a volume knob right on the case to adjust both the PC speaker and the Tandy sound chip. Having that saved me more than once from my dad's wrath lol

[@brentfisher902]

@@NintendoComplete I had a later version of that problem...with the dial-up modem speaker...until I discovered ATM3.

[@Miler97487]

It's nice they came up with digitized audio for PC speakers if you couldn't afford a soundcard or your machine didn't have one, so it's nice to see some games utilize that. I never owned a PC in the day, so I didn't know about the evolution of the PC much aside from reading the occasional magazine. I knew that Mean Streets used digitized speaker audio, now I know some other games that used it. On the other hand I'm shocked at the amount of games as late as 1991 still using that annoying beepy PC speaker audio. In the 1980s I owned an Atari 800XL that totally clobbered the PC in sound quality (because it had a soundchip, the POKEY), until digitized speaker audio and of course the soundcards like AdLib and SoundBlaster came around.

[@Rev-]

Wow, really nice to hear some of the first game sounds I experienced over PC speaker again! I soon realized I needed a sound card, but some of these games I really remember. The first OutRun for PC DOS was playing over PC speaker as well, not only the 2000 version. I remember that because I saw and heard it on a CeBit computer as a kid and later got the game myself.

[@5mf1nc]

TBH, it ain't PCM - as the speaker output is not capable of producing more than 1 or 0 logic levels, and there are no LPF other than the speaker coil/membrane itself - but PWM (like a 1-bit DAC). The quality depends on the carrier and modulation frequencies, and the physics of the actual speaker (the mechanical LPF), so the much faster piezoelectric speakers sounded horrendous whit these, unlike the "regular" coil-membrane ones.

[@RaposaCadela]

Holy shit I knew it could do samples, but man, AMIGA QUALITY IN-GAME MUSIC, now THAT I wasn't expecting

[@JasperTedVidalTale]

The only problem is that most of the games that used it only played the music on a static screen because it's very cpu intensive. However there are a few exceptions but they require a beefy CPU to work such as 4d boxing (Electronic Arts version), Crime wave, Pinball Fantasies, Etc

[@rfichokeofdestiny]

There was a PC demo that I downloaded from Compuserve or something around the late 80s or early 90s that did this trick with Rough Boy by ZZ Top. It also had panning still frame photos going at the same time. One was a scene from Star Wars, one was a fairly well-known picture of a frog with it's tongue out. I've searched for this and can't find it anywhere, but I remember it clearly. Anybody else remember what it was called?

[@linkskywalker5417]

4:47 Sounds like vaporwave on a PC speaker.

[@DaVince21]

11:43 My jam! By the way, check out Interpose. It had kickass music that could also be played through the speaker.

[@tomypower4898]

Yes regrets! Yes remorse

[@Bimshwel]

Thank you for compiling this! I never knew about this sort of thing; I got a computer in 1994, and the only pc speaker stuff I heard was from low budget shareware games off a $5 cd. Looking at the sort of games this appears in; racing games, golf games, slow action games with huge parts of the screen kept static, I doubt I would have played any of them so it makes sense this is my first experience. The sort of stuff I through the internet came to associate with European computer culture. I guess it was everywhere and I just missed it. Audio like this probably would have been deafening anyway since I had no clue how to adjust the pc-speaking volume. I think it had to be done through the bios. STILL, beeply recorded audio would have been impressive to encounter.

[@thepirategamerboy12]

Darkseed plays pretty good quality voices whenever you talk to anyone in the PC speaker mode, too.

[@Miler97487]

The music on Crime Wave is actually none other than Pink Floyd, in this case "One Step" off A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987).

[@cubecast1]

my favourite PCM sample is IM THE MIRACLE BALL in alex kidd the lost stars

[@stevenpavelish6017]

STALE MEME Mine too!

[@StoneBust]

And don't forget the iconic PCM scream of his: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

[@manganoid7426]

Hell, first modules I made were in FastTrekker 2, on PC speaker on PC 386 back in 1990s, didn't have audio card XD

[@nathantru2979]

What where your songs called?

[@manganoid7426]

@@nathantru2979 Unfortunately, i didn't publish any of them back then. I only post my c64 and Sunvox stuff here on YT

[@BuddyBoy600alt]

That’s the Tandy 1000. Unlike the PC Speaker, The Tandy 1000 has the volume control and headphone jack.

[@nopochoclos]

I remember the amazing game, TRISTAN PINBALL using the speaker like champ.. the intro cornets

[@yako668]

I love it, keep up the good work (y) and plz make more fmv gameplay videos!

[@NintendoComplete]

N.J Production Thanks! And any ideas for FMV games I haven't done? If be willing to consider suggestions:)

[@1lapmagic]

I just learned about this. Why couldn't this era have lasted so much longer?

[@McCormick9000]

Thank you for this gigantic collection !!! :'D

[@PravdaFIN]

4:48 A E S T H E T I C

[@AngryCalvin]

Clicked here for nostalgia remembering how terrible the PC speaker was. How could this not be Sound Blaster? We were lied to.

[@BlahBleeBlahBlah]

Damn so many good tracker tunes and game music I hadn’t heard before. Thanks for sharing, the crunchy sound of that little PC speaker doing its best has its own charm, impressive. On say a 286/25 like your example, how much CPU time would playing a tracker tune take?

[@ShanetheFreestyler]

Technically, Hard Drivin' isn't playing back PCM samples, it's using a software engine to play multi-channel audio. Similar tricks were used on systems like the Apple ][ and the ZX Spectrum which also only had beepers that could only play mono-tones by default.

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

Hard Drivin' Nice LOD on the barn, it has no roof until it's ten feet away :D

[@ashkirby8896]

So on Fasttracker 2, the PC Speaker could be used as an output for the channels? Cool!😄

[@freddyvretrozone2849]

As you use DOSBox, the sound is totally different on Real PC Speaker. DOSBox interprete the Timer value change (PWM) as direct PCM Audio. Then, the sound is much better with DOSBox.

[@theeltea]

Very true, the artifacting sounds way different. Then again, dosbox imlementation makes sense.

[@joe--cool]

@@theeltea Doxbox-X has a more accurate mode. But this is pretty faithful for a big membrane pc-speaker. A tiny piezo one would sound much worse. I had mine wired to the SB16 Speaker input using a switch so I could toggle it between the case and my stereo system.

[@coondogtheman]

This is amazing. The one with cannon fodder theme is possibly the best one but there's a lot of these that sound awesome for a PC speaker. I wonder if you could find the audio files in some of these games and replace them with your own sounds or music.

[@xtrememusicpk]

Electro Man a.k.a. Electro Body (from Germany) should be here too, 'cos it's a game that uses PC Speaker 2 play PCM samples like these examples that u've been shown!!

[@NintendoComplete]

Paulo Robson Ribas Kincheski Oh yeah? I'll have to check it out, I'm not familiar with it :)

[@YoshYouYube]

it's from Poland :) nice game btw

[@caseyhenderson7661]

OMG. Mean Streets!! And music trackers!! :D

[@MrKrossav4eg]

NintendoComplete, you still have your "improved" version of DOSBox? Can you upload it please and give a link?!

[@kaboomgamer333]

PC Speakers can actually sound better than adlib if they have no graphics memory.

[@theeltea]

Apples to oranges

[@skrunkledunkle-p7w]

The audio quality ranges from Amiga to phonograph.

[@simone2059]

Very fascinating to see this

[@fungo6631]

I believe you need the SVN Daum fork of DOSBox for proper PC speaker audio.

[@shaneofthemariofans.7524]

They Fit For Some Reason

[@brentfisher902]

7:06 The animal species "Bos Taurus" wants your car to allow location access...

[@jco997]

"PCM". I guess you can call it that, if you consider it as a 1 bit PCM. IMHO, PC Speaker is in reality Delta Sigma Modulation.

[@williamwilliam9993]

Even in tandy DAC audio can play up to 48khz mono audio and improvement over pc speaker audio

[@Scioneer]

Damn, I forgot all about Purple Saturn Day.

[@shiru8bit]

A little bit of spamming, but I believe some might get interested on how far the PC Speaker could've been pushed without relying on samples, i.e. the classic bleepy way: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qobcYoB7pdaVrM0

[@DanielMonteiroNit]

as much as I love Hard Drivin, that doesn't look like being PCM

[@JaceCavacini]

It sounds like a software emulated three-voice beeper was mixed down to one channel of PCM.

[@BdR76]

There is a game "Fury the nightmare begins" from *1986* which also has digitized voices. Are there any earlier games? Which game was the first to use this trick?

[@meatballmeatwad5730]

1:19 Someone needs to post this song on. KZbin even if it's just a loop

[@supermariofan772003]

Wait, Bad Cat was on DOS?

[@NintendoComplete]

DaJoshy Thankfully! Its music was amazing!

[@pearljammer364]

Mach 3's PCM is the best.

[@userdetails1]

"The water is wet"

[@JaceCavacini]

Half of the runtime of this video is not games. Any idea how the multichannel audio in Digger was done? Was it the same technique used to output four channel MODs on the PC speaker? It sounds like classic beeper sounds, but it’s multichannel.

[@NintendoComplete]

No, but it is all game music. I'm not sure, but I would guess that it probably be the same as the tracker does here - by downmixing multiple sound channels into a single output that could then be pushed through the PC speaker. It's a pretty heavy load for a 16-bit CPU, but some games did do it.

[@keenius74]

how can u get voice for 3 stooges? i do miss that

[@NintendoComplete]

Jeff Mullins On a real pc or emulated, you need the CPU running at a similar speed as the original game required or it will distort or just not play. Iirc, an 8088 or low-end 286 was fine. Anything 32bit (386+) won't work with sound and probably will be too fast to be playable

[@BuddyBoy600alt]

NintendoComplete SepTandy did a review with the DOS version. Only works when you use the Tandy 1,000.

[@BlazeRhodon]

Man I got used to most air raid sirens noises in my area. In compare of this it sounds wonderful. But seriously, I know that PC Speaker hardware was much more primitive than sound chip on Commodore Amiga (or even on Atari ST), nevertheless it could sound good if it was used in right way. I actually prefer 4-bit PCM sound from PC Speaker than expensive MIDI synthesizer. Sound for sure has a bad quality, but it sounds much more realistic than MIDI.

[@brentfisher902]

And that...my friends is the difference between accuracy and precision...the MIDI file has high precision...but low accuracy...the 4-bit PCM has high accuracy...but low precision. In archery class. if you are accurate but not precise you have a cloud of arrow shafts centered around the bulls eye pretty good...if you are precise but not accurate you have a narrow dot of split arrow shafts on the outer edge of the target and almost none near the bulls eye. It is accurate to say Pepsi and Coke are alike because they are a cola drink...but they are not precisely the same drink.

[@theeltea]

Realistic? :)

[@607]

I want to try this, but I don't know how to use the pc speaker in my current laptop...

[@sindobrandnew]

9:40 a REALSOUND.

[@coondogtheman]

I'm curious if it's possible to extract these samples from the game's data files and convert them to wave what they would sound like vs being played through the pc speaker hardware. Not sure how you recorded these for the video.

[@brentfisher902]

DOSbox will do a direct PCM synthesis of it...with the PC speaker you get electronic noise from the motherboard which would be more retro-accurate.

[@coondogtheman]

@@brentfisher902 I found a program called Slade which is a doom editor and it lets you open .WAD files and look at the data inside and yes it will let you hear the PC speaker sounds. I recorded them into a wav file using Goldwave with stereo mix. They are pretty clear sounding.

[@coondogtheman]

@@brentfisher902 What I meant was if the data that makes up these samples if you extract them from the game files and convert to wav if they would sound better than going through the PC speaker circuits.

[@coondogtheman]

@Laz Rabbit So All the sounds are strung together into one file and each sound is tagged in some way and the game just plays the one it needs. I downloaded an arcade game (area 51) and did a sound rip and I found a file that had all the sound effects in the game. I extracted it and ended up with a long wav file of all the sounds.

[@ashkirby8896]

16:35 Hey, and Cannon Fodders!😄

[@deejaykike]

I doubt a 286 CPU could handle FT2 like are you trying to show here... And if you used Dosbox, Dosbox isn't a 286! Let me explain : One point : FastTracker2 was released in 1994 designed for 386 or better. Second point : 286 is a 16 bit CPU unlike 386 architecture and FastTraker needs to change cpu to protected mode with a custom extender. Third point : Software DAC and PC Speaker driver are CPU hog without DMA and generation of high frequencies like this would be overkiller for a CPU. Talking about 30 year of experience and never seen FT2 in a 286 but technically can't run it.

[@AaronPaden]

FT2 might not work, but it possible for a mod player to be written even on an original PC, as seen in the end credits of 8088 MPH.

[@deejaykike]

yes, the comentary at 16:30 is wrong

[@valenrn8657]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286 _The performance increase of the 80286 over the 8086 (or 8088) could be more than 100% per clock cycle in many programs (i.e., a doubled performance at the same clock speed). This was a large increase, fully comparable to the speed improvements around a decade later when the i486 (1989) or the original Pentium (1993) were introduced. This was partly due to the non-multiplexed address and data buses, but mainly to the fact that address calculations (such as base+index) were less expensive. They were performed by a dedicated unit in the 80286, while the older 8086 had to do effective address computation using its general ALU, consuming several extra clock cycles in many cases. Also, the 80286 was more efficient in the prefetch of instructions, buffering, execution of jumps, and in complex microcoded numerical operations such as MUL/DIV than its predecessor.[11]_ _The Intel 80286 had a 24-bit address bus and was able to address up to 16 MB of RAM, compared to the 1 MB addressability of its predecessor. However, memory cost and the initial rarity of software using the memory above 1 MB meant that 80286 computers were rarely shipped with more than one megabyte of RAM.[11] Additionally, there was a performance penalty involved in accessing extended memory from real mode (in which DOS, the dominant PC operating system until the mid-1990s, ran), as noted below._ Despite being 16bit CPU, 80286 has IPC (instructions per clock) improvements over 8086.

[@Synthematix]

Cannon fodder = best

[@brentfisher902]

It's been an ear worm out loud with me more than 3 times in the past....Another is Triplex track 2 for the Commodore 64 (the chord lead riff)

[@DeschutesCore]

And now we're doing it all over again with an Arduino and a sqeaker.

[@kaboomgamer333]

Why didnt doom do this?

[@dosnostalgic]

Because it's demanding for the CPU to keep up correct timing. For DOOM all the priority went to the graphics engine, and that was already enough for the CPUs of the time.

[@brentfisher902]

@@dosnostalgic In 1994...running Doom on a PC that you bought on a ramen noodle budget is the electric utility equivalent of a diesel truck 'rolling coal' past a Prius...the black smoke billows out of the smokestacks of the power companies generator plant so much that the whole Native American telephone exchange becomes unusable....

[@katie2940]

W H A T HOW

[@drzeissler]

BadCat is too slow.

[@novostranger]

How u got bad cat ost??? Is difficult to find.

[@NintendoComplete]

I recorded it from the game

[@novostranger]

@@NintendoComplete i want it in yt

[@NintendoComplete]

@@novostranger It's in this video

[@novostranger]

@@NintendoComplete no... a bad cat song only video

[@NintendoComplete]

@@novostranger kzbin.info/www/bejne/f52toZ1saZuei9k :)

[@gamegenie4617]

0:12

[@meridonmage9076]

1986 Fantasy rapsody; nevahremembreds daHwazzlueb on algae Waves leisure suiT larry3 Technologicium WERK Magistratiëns!

[@nathantru2979]

?

[@Synthematix]

If commodore were still around the ibm pc would be dead.

[@brentfisher902]

If humans used persuasion we would still be O.B.O.D. druids flashing the octopus outside....

[@ebilhabsencwhizz1617]

datz no gooda noose ablib babblę

[@ebilhabsencwhizz1617]

this is an outrage! winners go on the news and say sorry for all the aids often