VOGONS


First post, by kamiledi15

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Hello, I'm from Poland, so sorry for my English.
I have a modern PC, but I still like to play old games. I would like to use internal PC Speaker for old games. I'm sure that this device exists in my computer - I found a program, which can play wav files with internal PC Speaker and it works, so I'm sure that I have it. But I can't use it for games. In Dosbox the Pc Speaker sounds are played with my headphones. I've read on some forums, that it's impossible to do it in Dosbox and VirtualBox, but I've read that I can use it in VMWare and Virtual PC. Virtual PC doesn't seem to work on Windows 10, but I installed VMWare Player with MS-DOS, I played some old games on it and the result is the same as in Dosbox - sound from the game, which should be played by internal PC Speaker, is played on my headphones. When I unplug headphones, there is completely no sound. I made some research in Google and the only thing I found on many sites is... how to turn off the PC Speaker on VMWare, but I can't find out how to make it work. Can someone help me? Or maybe the only possible way is to buy a real old computer?
Maybe I can make a small partition on my disc and install MS-DOS separately from Windows 10, without using virtual machine? Would it solve the problem? I don't know whether it's possible.

Reply 1 of 9, by Jorpho

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kamiledi15 wrote:

I found a program, which can play wav files with internal PC Speaker and it works, so I'm sure that I have it.

Many modern systems only have a primitive "piezoelectric" beeper that is considerably inferior to the PC speaker used in older systems. You might want to consider using an older system if you are particularly serious about this. (I suppose you could in theory take the speaker from an old case and mount it in your current system, unless the beeper is an integral component of the motherboard.)

Were you running this program of yours in Windows 10?

Maybe I can make a small partition on my disc and install MS-DOS separately from Windows 10, without using virtual machine? Would it solve the problem? I don't know whether it's possible.

It would be much easier to use a properly-configured boot CD or a bootable USB drive. But if your computer is running Windows 10, it is probably much, much too fast for any DOS program old enough to use the PC speaker, and I doubt there is any way to slow it down sufficiently.

Reply 2 of 9, by kamiledi15

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Thanks for the reply.
But, if I would take speaker from an old computer and put it in new computer, would it start to work, if this "beeper" doesn't work in games?
I don't know whether it's a piezoelectric beeper or good PC Speaker, but it sounds pretty nice when I play these mid files in it (sorry, these are midi files, not wav - my mistake).
The program is called Bawami and yes, I can run it directly in Windows 10.
Ok, so I will try to install MS-DOS on USB flash drive and check whether it would let me play PC Speaker. So it seems that it's impossible to use it in any virtual machine?

Reply 3 of 9, by Scali

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I am not sure if it will work in a virtual machine, but it will definitely not work with DOSBox, because it emulates the PC speaker, and sends the emulated signal over your sound card.
If you boot real MS-DOS directly from a USB drive or DVD or such, then the speaker should work. Piezo or 'real' speaker doesn't matter. They just sound a bit different.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 4 of 9, by Jorpho

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kamiledi15 wrote:

But, if I would take speaker from an old computer and put it in new computer, would it start to work, if this "beeper" doesn't work in games?

No, but it would sound substantially better than the beeper. Or so I've been told.

So it seems that it's impossible to use it in any virtual machine?

I'm not sure. It seems unlikely, but then I had not heard of this "Bawami" before either.

Reply 5 of 9, by kamiledi15

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This is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eb_U6iEV94
Ok, so I will try tomorrow to boot MS-DOS from flash drive, I hope that it's not very complicated, because I never did it before. If the speaker will work and the sound will be nice, I will leave it as it is, and if not, I will consider buying old computer. Another problem is that I want to use 5,25 floppy drive and I can't connect it to motherboard, but I found a solution (a small attachment to buy), so we will see if it will work. Thanks for help.

Reply 6 of 9, by Scali

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For fun, I made a program that can stream digital audio from the harddisk of my IBM 5160, which has a real PC speaker with cone, sounds like this: https://youtu.be/387mfVRLGBQ
(I just used a short loop here, but it's actually a longer file, with the same sample spliced together multiple times. You can see the HDD loading in between. So it could just as well be a full song. I just hadn't prepared any other sample data at the time, was just a proof-of-concept).
And this is a slightly modified version of the chipmod player routine from 8088 MPH, playing on my 286 clone, which also has a real PC speaker with cone: https://youtu.be/pjzsgAqCHl4

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 8 of 9, by Raffaello

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Sorry about bumping this old topic but... Could anyone please upload Bawami somewhere, since it's a freeware program? It looks like its author's site has been down for quite some time!

Thanks in advance!

Reply 9 of 9, by F2bnp

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Raffaello wrote:

Sorry about bumping this old topic but... Could anyone please upload Bawami somewhere, since it's a freeware program? It looks like its author's site has been down for quite some time!

Thanks in advance!

Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20161022034036/ht … /update/bawami/