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Question: DOS games and PC Speaker sheet music output.

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First post, by mikedebian

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Hello. I would like to apologize in advance in case you're left a bit puzzled with the terminology I am using. English is not my main language, so I hope you understand.

I have a folder with a few PC Speaker songs that I'm able to play using the PC speaker in my Linux distribution. The command is "beep" and after that follows a sequence of frequencies, length tones and what have you, for which then it produces music.

So, this can give me a long list of frequencies (like over 2 thousand at times). I will upload the Monkey Island theme music for you to play, if you're either using a Linux distro, or if your Operating System understands the syntaxes after the command.

**What I'm wondering is that, I wish to have MORE music from MSDOS PC speaker games, like Outrun (I know it has 3-voice support), or Test Drive 1 and 2.**
This is also for archival purposes

Is there a way to use either DosBOX or DosEMU to output frequencies used in a game as sheet music, or as a list?
Is there an MSDOS application which can capture PC speaker music and list the raw frequencies used in a game?
Is there a Linux terminal application that can capture PC speaker sound and transcribe it to a frequency list?

Is there a website with resources for this?

The reason I am asking is because I've always loved the PC-Speaker and I've always loved PC-Speaker music. I hope I am not alone. I don't know where to post this, so I'm trying different subreddits.

[Link to pastebin with monkey island sheet music](https://pastebin.com/7EZ5vS4w)

[Link to beep application on github](https://github.com/johnath/beep/)

Reply 1 of 7, by Sammy

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I am not sure what you searching for.....

But something may be help you:

There are tools to use the pc speaker as output driver in Win3.x and 95.
This may also work in a Virtual Machine.
So you can play WAVs with the PC speaker.

on the other way you can use a soundcard with a PC speaker input to record your pc speaker sound as WAV.

Maybe you can also record the output of a emulated pcspeaker sound (dosbox)

Reply 2 of 7, by mikedebian

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Sammy wrote:

Maybe you can also record the output of a emulated pcspeaker sound (dosbox)

This is what I am looking for.

I am also looking to see if there is a program out there that can transcribe PC speaker frequencies into numbers, like in the Monkey Island example I linked to.
If so, people can play it with their native PC speaker, since DosBOX emulation is less than perfect (one would be able to adjust the frequency numbers to match how it actually sounded like), and it could be archived as text (frequency numbers).

Reply 4 of 7, by mikedebian

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Jorpho wrote:

I recall this thread from the last time someone wanted to capture PC Speaker output.
Capture PC Speaker

And your English is practically flawless.

Very interesting! I'm going to try and work something out of this. I wonder if that user ever made something out of his/hers project!

And thank you 😀

Reply 5 of 7, by Matth79

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One of the best DOS Speaker players (also supports sound cards) was "Inertia Player", a MOD player (MOD/S3M formats).
Many games used this format for their music, and some rips of the music to MOD may be found.

MOD / Screamtracker format is unusual, kind of a combination of midi and custom soundbank in one

Reply 6 of 7, by Spikey

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Incidentally, for Sierra games in the MIDI days, the PC Speaker track is almost always the main melody track (1 channel) of a given song.

There is some good PC Speaker music out there. Trying to think of an oldie I liked, but it is escaping me. Of course there's always Alley Cat. 😀

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