PC Speaker Music: An Introduction
27 ������� 2011 at 12:20 am, posted by irrlichtprojectThe PC speaker is one of the most popular 1bit devices, as it can be found in nearly every older PC. Yet its musical capabilities are generally overlooked, and reliable information on the subject is scarce. The following article tries to give a short overview of the history, current state, and methods of PC speaker music.
The PC speaker works in fact very much like our beloved Speccy beeper. Generating sound on the PC speaker is a simple matter of setting bit 0 and 1 of port 61h, which causes the beeper to be switched on or off. The timing is usually controlled by the channel 2 of the Programmable Interval Timer (PIT) chip, which runs at a frequency of 1,193,182 Hz. Some more complex synthesis methods use the main system timer (PIT channel 0) instead.
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