DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music (opens in new tab)

One 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...

This 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 and fit the theme of the game - but to keep the environment of Doom and the dark and moody feel and not be limited to the dulcet tones of a tiny piezo buzzer was a design decision, not being lazy.

Note that they could have supported Disney Sound Source / Covax Speech Thing style audio (they did in Wolf3D and Keen) but skipped that as well, likely for the same reason - it would have sounded like murky hollow garbage.

You can email John Romero and ask him, he responds to emails - my guess is that he will say "yeah we considered it, it sounded bad, we abandoned the idea" not that they were lazy. If you read about the run up to Doom's release, and the amount of crunch time they were putting in, they were anything but lazy!

While this is a wonderful technical feat, I think it's not nearly as playable. The video shows that it doesn't mix the gameplay sounds with the music track, so it pauses the music every time to play a sound (gun shot, door opening, item pick up, etc). This is really distracting compared to the adlib driver that mixes them together and so the music doesn't stop/start harshly. And IIRC, the adlib music is quieter then the effects, which also helps the music stay as background sounds. I don't think Id was lazy, just thinking about the full experience.

Not 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 once saw a C64 disk drive 1541 play the US national anthem by moving the floppy drive head across the disk in patterns to produce mechanical noise which vould be interpreted as a melody/tune. So a combination of a cheap built in speaker and a floppy disk could have produced stereo sound!!!!

Meanwhile, 8 year old Amigas were playing 12 bit digital stereo sound on 4 channels … on a preemptive multitasking system on a machine with less RAM and a < 8Mhz CPU.

Is 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)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound

Apparently this website runs on an IP camera. The admin was contemplating moving it to a Galaxy S5 but after a previous HNning the IP camera and its 32 MB of memory was good enough. https://lenowo.org/viewtopic.php?t=28

For a game that did this incredibly well look at Star Control 2.

Amazing .mod based techno music via pc speaker that mixed in sound effects, even including short vocal clips (pkunk insults). All running on a humble 286 which played the game well while managing this. For those that say this was a choice due to poor pc speaker quality the toys for bob engineers pulled it off with incredible results years prior.

It was just a pain to do.

Interesting 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.

My first PC (in 1993) ran on Linux (0.99). As it didn't have a sound card I used the PC speaker as one. It sounded very tinny but speech was understandable enough. Even in the newest kernels there is a driver (https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/SND_PCSP.html) that exposes the speaker as an ALSA device. For sentimental reasons I will enable it next time I compile my kernel, though I don't expect much: the PC speaker is even more of an afterthought now than it was 33 years ago, and may even be a piezoelectric "buzzer" instead of a speaker with a coil and a paper cone.

You can have it in DOOM 2D: https://web.doom2d.org/

The original source code for DOS got reverse-engineered here: https://repo.or.cz/doom2d-restoration.git (discussion: https://doom2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2996 )

I still remember being shocked by the FX sound from my PC speaker. That was before I got enough money to buy a SoundBlaster-compatible card.

I'm going to date myself here. In 199x, we had a 286 and loved a game called "Command HQ" that had lovely gameplay and sound to boot! Then we got the ol' Packard bell 486 with a sound blaster. We played the same game (which had midi output too) for the first time and my father and I cried -- it was unbelievable.

That's when I first became enamoured with the "art of the possible" and this has driven my career.

I fully believe that doom could have had pc speaker sound; after all w3d did!

I’ve got a question to all of the people who had PCs back then, were audio cards that expensive that it wasn’t worth just buying one if you had any interest in gaming?

Just doing a little research it was like $80 - $100 to add it.

I do remember back then that the motto was for PCs that “the computer wanted was always $2000”.

My first time having an x86 PC was in 1994 when I bought the 486DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card for my PowerMac 6100/60. It had a SoundBlaster daughtercard.

One of my first audio dev jobs was to add Creative Labs AWE32 support to a game called "Spectre VR", which at the time was one of the most popular multi-player/networked games for PC's.

It was, literally, a blast. The AWE32 was basically a sampler on a card, for PC's, and it was CL/Velocity's intention to bundle SpectreVR with the AWE32 for release. SpectreVR had a PC-Speaker driver, which was .. viable .. if you had the processing power for it. But AWE32 support just kicked serious ass, so it was a major push to get it working.

We got it working, it was hilariously fun, and the upgrade in audio had everyone in the office clamoring for the limited AWE32's we'd been allocated for development.

Then, DOOM hit the 'net, and everyone moved on, really fast, from SpectreVR, and it wasn't long until the bundling deal came undone, and DOOM got the AWE32 treatment instead. That was a frustrating state of affairs, but at least I got a free AWE32 out of it ..

When Windows replaced DOS in the 1990s, I hoped I'd seen the last of that fugly cursed (to paraphrase the site's motto) IBM VGA text mode font. Little did I know that retrocomputing fans seem to be very much in love with it...

Sounds like a 3D Commander Keen.

What a beautiful bit of hacking! This is awesome, and made my day to see :) It sounded -much- better than I would have guessed!

Impulse Tracker supported the PC speaker as an output device. It wasn't perfect but it was pretty amazing.

https://archive.org/details/impulse_202406

Obviously so, since games on 8 bit micros with simple square wave speakers had action games with sound effects and music, all with just assembly language running at 1 mHz in kilobytes of memory.

Good job, it sounds great!

id Software should have just partnered with a heavy metal band that jointly released an album of Doom music you could put in your stereo while you play the game.

The thing that made the PC speaker so unbearable for me was the inability to change the volume - 6am family PC gaming was NOT okay if I woke everyone up with beeps and bloops.

I thought it already had beeper speaker music, but everyone had at least a sb16...?

Nice website design

Terrible headline. I’m not going to click that link because I won’t encourage ridiculous clickbait.

The music sounds great but stopping the music to play sound effects sounds terrible