Recording PC-internal (yes!)

Joined: 25 Oct 2002 Posts: 214 Location: Stockholm

Naturally the sounds don't come out the same way if recorded straight off the motherboard output, albeit run through the soundcard, but I doubt the soundcard will do anything to actually alter the sound. I had an old Compaq ass (late-issue 486 model) which also ran the beeper through the on-board sound outputs. Through a set of Taiwanese "PC" speakers, the beeps and boops sounded very clear, even with the horrendous quality of that kind of speakers, since just about everything is better than the piece of membrane or piezo fit inside the average PC case. It's got little do with the sound card, and much to do with the quality (or lack thereof) of the built-in speaker. Naturally, the cheap-cheap speaker might be regarded as the target platform, in which case recording the speaker output instead of the line output would be the correct way.

PC nostalgia, that's something new to me. But I do remember listening to modules on my grandfather's 486, using Cubicplayer, and laughing at the machine while still being impressed of the feat. Naturally, even a fast processor such as the 486 was being pushed to its limits just mixing down a four-channel module to the ridiculous limitations of the PC speaker system. It actually makes MOD players on a plain Atari ST sound good.

Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 1

Started reading this thread and wanted to try out the Internal Speaker for myself.

http://www.monstaquake.com/admins/railchu/mi2-largos_theme.mp3

Here is my first attempt using my microphone to record Largo's Theme from Monkey Island 2. I did not have any software to reduce noise, so you get to enjoy the sounds of 4 other computers running in the background. If anyone wants to try to clear that up, that would be neat.

Next I will try to go through the Sound Blaster, hopefully its result will come out just as good.

Joined: 22 Feb 2002 Posts: 37 Location: Turku, Finland

Hey, that sounded nice! It had much less noise than my microphone recordings had!

Suni.

Posted: 2003-12-30 19:07

Hi, just some aditional info on pc-speaker sound, soldering to the motherboard is not always the best to do.

If you hook a cable (jack or cinch, xlr doesnt make sence here because there are only 2 poles) do it either in parallel with the speaker in your pc, or, replace the speaker with an 4 to 8 omh load, and coil for noise reduction, and connect the ground wire with ground wire and the + with +.

If not there's a big change that you hear your interupts ticking aswell as the original sound.

If your pc have this PE speaker(flat round metal thing) its a must to make an sound-out since these speakers cannot play PWM sounds, you'll need a normal active speaker for that.

Often this way of connecting provides you a DC load in the signal, this means that the signal is not between 0 and aprox. 5V but going from lets say 2 till +-7V, if you record such a signal its wise to use an DC removal plugin(I use protools, with got such a thing with the program)
If not there's a higher risk to blow your speakers with such a recording.

People where talking so far about recording existing music, but its
possible to code your own sounds and music.
I practice this for quit some time, are there anymore freaks doing this?
Would be nice to know

best joost

Joined: 06 Jan 2004 Posts: 2

A way of dumping PC speaker sounds would be to write a TSR. It wouldn't be too hard. Let me check it out.

Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 25 Location: Finland

Hmm... Old games that use the PC Speaker can be recorded under DOSBox, if i'm correct..

Joined: 23 Dec 2003 Posts: 6 Location: Toulouse, France

joost wrote:

If you hook a cable (jack or cinch, xlr doesnt make sence here because there are only 2 poles) do it either in parallel with the speaker in your pc, or, replace the speaker with an 4 to 8 omh load, and coil for noise reduction, and connect the ground wire with ground wire and the + with +.

Where do you put the coil ?

I finally made a cable to record PC-speaker. The speaker itself was replaced with a 8 ohm (0.5 W) resistor, and the + was soldered to a jack cable pluged into the line-in input of my sound card. I added a 1 microF capacitor between the + and the line-in to prevent short-circuit in case of misplug. As the input impedance of the sb-live is 47 kOhm, this makes a -3dB cutoff frequency at 3 Hz, which is sufficient to record sound. Indeed it is too sufficient: usual internal speakers have a very bad low frequency response, so when you play the tune on normal speakers, bass are popping out Smile

By the way, the first recording try by suni (the one with the pc-speaker in connector) had a lot of clipping. Maybe that's why it sounded so distorted.

If you want to listen to the result, here's the official benchmark Smile

. The signal over noise ratio is not tremendous but it's perfectly listenable.

So now I have a proper recording setup, do you know nice tunes on internal PC speaker ? I have already recorded Zak Mc Kracken, Maniac Mansion and Xenon 2.

Posted: 2004-05-03 11:46

Grand Prix Circuit from Accolade had some nice ditties...

Posted: 2004-05-03 19:20

Wow, that's like hi-fi! Smile

Joined: 22 Feb 2002 Posts: 37 Location: Turku, Finland

That sounded really great!
I agree that GPCircuit could have nice sounds. Loom by Lucasfilm has music from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, though it supports AdLib so you'll have to play it without it to get internal if you want to Smile

. Also you might want to try Cycles and Test Drive 2 also from Accolade.

Suni.

Joined: 14 May 2004 Posts: 21

PLEASE someone records Delphine software's FUTURE WARS time travelers Speaker O.S.T. , you'll find virtuosism of PC speaker Very Happy

Joined: 23 Dec 2003 Posts: 6 Location: Toulouse, France

Thank you ! I'm going to check all these tunes. But now I have trouble running both an old DOS game and a recording software on the same machine. I think I'll have to get an additionnal PC first, it'll be easier.

Joined: 16 Dec 2003 Posts: 23 Location: The Netherlands

. . . Or Zeliard. Dorado cave trough pc speaker Very Happy

(Or Digger. How about Saboteur II)

Ontopic:

I used to record pc speaker music with my Aztech Sound Galaxy pro soundcard. Worked like a charm. No Distortions at all. Unfortunately mine blew up when I attached a faulty Wavetable daughterboard. Try and find one of these.

Good luck.