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Comment by jammi | Hacker News Reader

A PC beeper can sound just as good, when used on a fast enough PC and the beeper output is connected to something better than the built-in piezo speaker. Even on the original IBM PC, you could make it sound almost as good by very careful optimization and close to 100% of allocation of CPU cycles, like shown at the end of the 8088 MPH demo: https://youtu.be/hNRO7lno_DM?t=6m52s

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We can agree to disagree, I just don't think PC beeper can in any realistic circumstances sound as good as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7PF5DSpjgM

How about this? There are also plenty of DOS PC-speaker-savvy demos from the 90s on pouet.net and scene.org, but there are apparently no recordings of them on youtube without sound card configurations. Some of the late DOS games also had awesome PC-speaker support. There was also a Windows sound driver for the PC speaker in Windows 3.1 times, maybe Windows 95 as well. Basically; the faster the PC, the higher the sampling rate you can go. The sound output on Raspberry Pis and some of the cheaper USB sound cards are also very similar to having stereo PC speakers, since that's also about just dumb bit-banged PWM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV1EMcH316s

Not bad, but that C64 demo sounds clearly better. C64 can have something between 6-8 bits of resolution per sample using a trick invented by Mahoney (https://livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Musik_RunStop_Technical_D...).

Mostly I remember this type of sound, even at higher sample rate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fErwWtkMS4

I wrote a noise shaping PC-beeper PWM converter in the nineties, oversampling at maybe 500 kHz or so. It still sounded very tinny. (First version was without shaping, and it had an annoying high frequency pitch.)

> Basically; the faster the PC, the higher the sampling rate you can go.

Not really, io-port (outb) encounters a brick wall pretty early. So no matter how fast the CPU is, you can't toggle the speaker any faster.

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