The Dark Art of DOS Audio: PC Speaker Tricks and PWM Madness
Think the old PC speaker was only good for making awful beeps? Yeah, me too—until I started digging into how it actually works.
In this video, I go down the rabbit hole of early PC audio. It starts simple: how sound is made in the first place, then some hands-on fun using Borland C++ to get the PC speaker beeping. From there, I build up to playing a proper little tune.
But things get wild after that.
I take a shot at playing a full WAV file using nothing but PWM trickery — all through the original PC speaker, no sound card required. Then I explore how games like Commander Keen and Duke Nukem handled audio, and show off some absolutely wild DOS demos that somehow managed to squeeze real sampled sound out of a one-bit speaker.
It’s weird, clever, and kind of brilliant — all at the same time.