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Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

I assume the PC speaker actually means the one connected directly to the motherboard, not whatever is connected to the sound card (which may be part of the motherboard). The voice recording would probably sound something more like:

  Krrfhrhfhfbhorg.  Krrfhrhfhfbhord.

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I don't know... we really made use of the PC speaker before sound cards were the norm. Remember the nice PC speaker sounds of the combat in the original Battle Chess? The only question is how much raw sound data you are allowed to store in your chip.

This webpage has some nice musical examples.

http://www.oldskool.org/sound/pc/#digitized

Which would still be more useful than classical music, if your objective is to tell the user that something is wrong.

Actually, in ~1987 on our XT clone, my dad or I'd found a little program whose sole purpose was to play a short snippet of something like "Mushroom, magic mushroom" - I think from a commercial or something.

It was grainy, but not only was the speech intelligible, the music wasn't overly painful (i.e. it was grainy, but only a bit more than a bad record).

I remember that...

I had a copy on a 5.25" floppy, copied it to the both the school librarie's XT machines and made it part of the boot batch file. Apparently I was the only one who found it amusing :(

especially if you don't speak English.

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