Mau1wurf1977 - cool video!
when I was a wee one my dad was tired of the LOUD and annoying pc speaker games I was playing on our XT clone (the dwarf's lightning magic in Golden Axe on a 4.77MHz cpu = 14 minutes of ear-splitting goodness... true story because I actually timed it once). So he installed an actual volume knob for it, that went into one of the ventlike slots of the front case bezel - that was a pretty cool mod for back then 😁
In one of my later machines I had a sound card without internal PC-SPK input, so I hacked a crude replacement by routing a cable from the speaker, through the opening of an unused slot on the back, and into the card's "line in". Looked funny as shit, but works surprisingly well if you're in that sort of pinch.
I think Access Software had instruction manuals for building custom audio cables for your PC speaker, just to show off RealSound in their games....
pewpewpew: the only "standard" that could've existed back then was the speaker from original IBM machines, all of which had the big honking 3" dynamic speaker.
You gotta remember that in the really early days (when the PC speaker was the only option), people used to do VERY interesting things with it, all of which could only work well on an actual speaker, and very badly (if at all) with a piezo buzzer:
- Games as early as 1982 had synthesized speech (as well as a host of shareware fun programs where you could type in text and have the PC read it out loud)
- Other games (e.g. Windmill Software) actually implemented a form of filtering and envelopes, making it halfway passable as a single-voice synth
- Multi-channel music (Music Construction Set, as well as some BASIC polyphony program that somehow made my PC speaker sound just like a Tandy/PCjr)
- Digital PCM audio playback (I think first introduced en-masse with Access Software's RealSound; later much more common, but only when SB and clones were already running rampant)
as for the OP... nothing prevents you from installing a Sound Blaster in an XT, as long as it fits into a 8-bit ISA slot.
it may not be rigorously "period-correct", and you won't benefit from it in a lot of games, but you could run "8088 Corruption"!
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