why the hell you want to play Betrayal at Krondor with pc speaker??

Well, cutting a long story short, I don't have any external speakers right now. I tried playing Krondor but it wouldn't play without DOSBox. Even if I used the PC speaker option, I couldn't hear anything. Then I tried playing Dave outside of DOSBox and my motherboard beeped just fine. That's why.

If you want the longer story here it is:

You see I was playing Interstate '82 and all of a sudden my theater surround system went poof and stopped working. It's warranty expired just a month ago (what are the odds?) and I'm kinda broke. I have some spare speakers but they got lost somewhere in the garage and I'm too lazy to search for them. Besides, when you're playing a car game, what good is stereo sound compared to DTS?

So I decided to play a game with less dramatic sound FX. BaK was my 1st choice. Now I know that the MIDI music on Krondor is awesome and I've heard rumors that the CD music is even awesomer. But my preference for the PC speaker is one not of quality but of curiosity. I just wanted to know how all that music sounded out of the good old PC squeaker. But then I ran into the said problem. So I came here and found out that DOSBox plays the squeaks thru the external speakers. Hence my new (and my first) thread.

just get speakers from the garage

I actually took your advice. but guess what? they're not working either.

so here i am with my flatscreen my 12 button joystick a broken home theater and NO speakers. none whatsoever. the only games i'll be able to play with sound till my next paycheck are Dangerous Dave and the like!

btw i did a more thorough search on the site and found that my question has actually been asked b4. but there were no replies. i'm assuming it can't be done? please tell me there's a way...

borrow/buy some old/used small speakers/headphones

🤣... considering that i wanna play a DOS game made in 1992, i guess using earphones isn't much of a downgrade.

Still, can anyone give me some technical advice? Is there some software i can use to force the output through the PC speaker? i have the realtek software. could that be used?

speaker.drv? 😁 🤣

I'M Sorry but can you elaborate?

Agh! That driver was made in HELL! (;

FYI: speaker.drv was a driver that did what you're after, but at a terrible price. It essentially stopped your PC while playing sounds. It didn't slwo down the PC, it frigging _stopped_ it. Not very usefule at all. Can't remember if the driver was for Win 3.x or Win 9x. Anyway, it'll be of no use to you.

On topic: the idea is wrong, wrong, wrong. I guess what you want is technically possible, but there are no drivers to do it, and there's reasons for that. You could try hooking up your PC speaker to the soundcard, but that won't make you happy either (if it works at all). DOSBox doesn't "route" all sounds and music to the speaker emulation either, though i guess one could code such functionality technically (no one in a normal state of mind will do that though).

Man, get a cheap pair of speakers or headphones. Buy, steal or borrow, and don't waste your and our time with that weird idea of yours.

I had it working in Windows 3.x, and it stopped the computer. Note that we are not saying "slowing" the computer, it stopped any task except the sound playing. Also, it could only render wav files, without MIDI support. It was widely used in secondary school, because you could put a 5 minute wav as windows start sound, knowing that nobody could stop it without resetting computer 🤣

I've found another version that "runs" (maybe it still "stops") Windows 9x and ME. Users of XP, Vista and 7 won't have the pleasure of hearing music through internal speakers.

Some computers (HP) have the internal speaker wired to the integrated sound card, so they can play sound without requiring external speakers (mono sound, and lower quality). You can buy speakers or headphones from as low as 10€, and they will sound far better than any solution involving internal speaker.

BTW... Pinball Fantasies 2 sounded a lot better in my old 486 using internal speaker, and it played fine considering music was playing continuosly.

Thanks for all your support guys. My problem's pretty much solved. I burrowed my neighbor's earphones and played until I got bored. He even lent me some cash and I took my sound system to the repair shop.

But to think that the almighty DOSBox actually doesn't have the option of emulating the PC speaker thru the PC speaker! Coding such functionality wouldn't exactly be a waste of time considering the said Pinball Fantasies situation or a situation like mine (albeit extremely unusual). Just a thought, that's all.

PC speaker operations are CPU intensive, and easily disturbed by other tasks. Keep in mind that while in DOS there was only a process running, in Windows you may find a dozen or so and you have to put data on the speaker with very precise timing.

I think that might be the reason why in Windows 3.x all processes were stopped while playing the sound.

use dosemu and be happy

gifted assassin wrote:

Coding such functionality wouldn't exactly be a waste of time considering the said Pinball Fantasies situation or a situation like mine (albeit extremely unusual). Just a thought, that's all.

Get started coding it then (Has to be cross-platform, has to work for at least 99% of all DOS games without issues). Have fun!

Thread closed