If you've clearly shown that the game hangs when the speaker is connected, but does not when it's disconnected, you've answered your own main question: in your setup this is happening.

Next question of course is why. A speaker's hardly a sensitive electronic component. Do you have a more traditional cone speaker somewhere? If that shows different behaviour, the issue could be with impedance of the little new one (plus bad motherboard design), if it also fails with a traditional speaker it points to a motherboard error.

Which motherboard do you have, and which game setup shows this issue?

The only way I can possibly see that happen due to the speaker itself is if the connected speaker's impedance is low enough to cause significant voltage drops in sensitive parts of the system. This should not be an issue with a piezo buzzer in good condition.

Piezo buzzers basically consists of two metal membranes with a thin dielectric in between. They could easily be shorted out by mechanical damage, manufacturing errors, or a conductive foreign object finding its way to the buzzer element. My guess would be that you simply had a bad buzzer back then.

Also, given the design, they should act very much like capacitors electrically. Somewhat far fetched, but perhaps this can affect driving circuitry expecting an inductive load somehow.

dionb wrote on 2024-10-16, 07:28:

Which motherboard do you have, and which game setup shows this issue?

don't remember the details unfortunately, other than it happening on a socket 7 board, because it has been a couple years and i didn't deem the issue interesting enough at the time to make a thread. it happened maybe once or twice in that setup screen, and the speaker did seem to work normally otherwise.