NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

This is the first and certainly not the last PBX that will appear on this show.


ShadowHog
@ShadowHog

Just confirming (here instead of YouTube comments for no reason whatsoever) that I was the kid who played the shareware episode of Jazz Jackrabbit with the PC speaker and didn't know any better. its me

I mean, I should have. The computer in question had a sound card. It was actually a pretty decent one even, an ESS 1688 if I remember what's in that childhood Pentium 133. But mucking around in setup programs was things Mom and Dad do, not something little ol' me does. Same with a few other DOS games like Commander Keen 4 (I think) and Hocus Pocus (I know for sure). Did use proper sound in Chex Quest at least? Does that even run a setup program before jumping straight into the thick of it? I also know sound worked perfectly fine in Day of the Tentacle (talkie).

Of course, at no point in my adult life have I used anything less than Sound Blaster support in any of these, I know better now, but kid me? lmao no.


the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

Recurring nightmares about games that fail auto-detection of the sound card because the CPU is too fast for the detection program and thus can't get working sound except through the PC speaker


NireBryce
@NireBryce

So I can't actually find any hits on google for this which probably means I misremembered.

but I could have sworn there was a very specific window of time where one of the processor manufacturers would make the CPU scream relevant information if the motherboard alert speaker was detached, I guess by overdriving it (or maybe making the power supply do it by rapidly being mean to it), and if it did exist, now I'm wondering if it did it for more than BIOS beep codes.

I want to say it was from the 90s or even early 2000s, when things didn't strictly need active cooling. Otherwise it seems more obvious to do it through the fan drive circuitry, and also that would probably drown out the noise it makes.

Anyway I'm imagining playing a game in the most dogshit CGA color scheme, with the processor occasionally setting itself on fire to make the sound effects play.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

I still have several of my old PC/104 and PC/104-Plus SBCs. (Sadly, no PCI104s, those were too new for them to be e-waste when I left that job.)

They had some neat aspects, but the stack-up often made heat dissipation a problem (we spent a lot of engineering time on designing cases that could passively cool them), and the PC/104-Plus modules were a particular pain to separate without bending pins. (Usually the ISA pins.)

The video makes a mistake though, both CPU modules are PC/104, just the first is 8-bit ISA bus PC/104, and the second is 16-bit ISA bus PC/104. PC/104-Plus adds a PCI bus connector on the opposite side of the board from the 16-bit ISA connectors.

They were extremely fun to prototype circuits with though. ISA was relatively simple to implement, and they often had a parallel port on top of that, in addition to any dedicated GPIO/PWM/DAC/ADC hardware that the CPU card might have had.

They still have a decent presence in the industrial computer space, though custom System on Module (SOM) designs, and things like the Jetson SOMs and low-coast SBCs like the Raspberry Pi have eaten into their market share.

I am in fact, that bitch: I only ever played a demo of Jazz Jackrabbit back in the day, on a machine with no sound, so I never really got what the big deal was at the time. TBH I had that experience with a number of PC "classics", especially the Apogee shareware stuff.

in reply to @the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi's post:

The pentium II laptop with a SB Pro clone card (actually more precisely some kind of clone of the Audician 32 Plus) that I got with some spare cash on eBay was cool on paper but wound up being a massive pain compared to the Pentium 100 Aptiva Stealth I took from a friend a couple years back,

(it worked fine for programs that can run from the windows dos prompt, but anything that can't? good luck, motherfucker)

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

That sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't place it.

Given the time-frame, I feel like it might have been making sound via a disk drive.

Oh, certain early home computers could be abused in various ways to generate weak AM (and possibly FM) RFI that was usable for audio output via a portable radio, and then there were several techniques for getting sound out of a TRS-80 Model 1 as described here.

I also remember messing around with weird ways to get audio out of graphing calculators in the 90s/2000s time frame. (Now I'm curious where my old Radio Shack mini amp/speaker went.)