oss sound system

[parabyte]

Be very interesting to have some sort of sound system, some sort of standard for games to make better beeps and bops? and perhaps some common available sound devices?

[ghaerr]

Neat idea - I had mentioned elsewhere some code from Doom that will play Doom audio files on the PC speaker, which I found very interesting, except for the problem of creating new audio files, for which a very old "Muse" program would need to be found.

However, supporting audio through legacy sound cards is a large project, as there were more than a couple standards over the years past, and specialized kernel drivers would have to be written for each of them, depending on which sound card is installed.

Supporting sound through software FFT (fast fourier transforms) is probably off the table, as these approaches almost always require fast CPUs and floating point, for which ELKS doesn't really have a standard implementation, although both GCC and OWC do support the 8087 math coprocessor. Our Basic interpreter also supports floating point, but only with a hardware 8087 or equivalent installed.

some sort of standard for games to make better beeps and bops?

Almost all games that I've seen already have their own non-standard approach to producing sound. Each of these have specialized drivers that produce sound only from the game itself, not supporting any sound outside the game. (E.g. Doom). So by porting the game, one might get audio for just that game, but not system-wide sound support.

perhaps some common available sound devices?

A list of sound devices and programmer contributions are needed to move this forward. I rmyself run QEMU on macOS and don't have access to PC hardware with any sound cards for development.

[tyama501]

Hi @drachen6jp

Thank you for adding PC support by int15!

It worked with the ibm ELKS on the Dosbox-X.
Here is the video with the same wavefile playing on it.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2c983e50-ffbe-43ff-bd7c-6c10736840de

Hello @ghaerr
It uses some cpu power but now it works for IBM PC by dynamically detecting PC-98 or PC
so, you can try it if you like.
Here is the wavefile I am using attached.

wave982.zip

Thank you.

[drachen6jp]

I checked supporting beep system with some PC emulator on Linux(x64).

pcem (SPC-4620P 286 8MHz) has beep, i8254 & int15h. so I could play PCM(128Kbyte) with this program.
dosbox-x(32bit x86) has been reported.
qemu9.2.0 doesn't have beep.very old qemu had that.
virtualbox7.1.6 doesn't have them.

PC-98
neko project has beep,i8254 & int1F.
dosbox-x has them,but int1F was broken.but this program supports it.

[rafael2k]

@drachen6jp, did you commit the wave player somewhere?
This is very interesting!

[drachen6jp]

Hello.rafael2k.
I uploaded this code only my web page.
everyone(who will not get money with it) can modiy that code.

thanks.

[rafael2k]

Thanks @drachen6jp ! Would you mind if I put in github with a name like "elks-player" (you decide)?

[rafael2k]

I also found this player, which also supports wav input:
https://github.com/miwelc/Internal-PC-Speaker-player--MS-DOS-Dos-Box-/blob/master/altavozw.c

But your code is more portable, supporting PC98 and other setups.

[rafael2k]

Uploaded the elks-player here: https://github.com/rafael2k/elks-player/