The PC Speaker shouldn't sound this good!

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Think the old PC speaker was only good for making awful beeps? Yeah, me too—until I started digging into how it actually works.

In this video, I go down the rabbit hole of early PC audio. It starts simple: how sound is made in the first place, then some hands-on fun using Borland C++ to get the PC speaker beeping. From there, I build up to playing a proper little tune.

But things get wild after that.

I take a shot at playing a full WAV file using nothing but PWM trickery — all through the original PC speaker, no sound card required. Then I explore how games like Commander Keen and Duke Nukem handled audio, and show off some absolutely wild DOS demos that somehow managed to squeeze real sampled sound out of a one-bit speaker.

It’s weird, clever, and kind of brilliant — all at the same time.

Credits
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This video was sponsored by Brilliant
IBM PC image - By Rama & Musée Bolo - File:IBM_PC-IMG_7271.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
PC XT 5160 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... - Veradrive, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons

#MSDOS #BorlandCPP #RetroCoding #DOSDev #chiptune