crazii
[suggestion] using the pcspeaker as an audio output
It would be cool if it was possible to playback the audio from the pcspeaker, it could be useful so that audio playback is possible even without a soundcard or a supported one
Andrew Zabolotny's Virtual Sound Blaster, which you could consider a spiritual ancestor to SBEMU, had support for this.
The major downsides of playing back PCM sound through a PC's internal speaker:
- It's very CPU intensive, even more so than outputting to a dumb LPT DAC such as the Covox Speech Thing
- Sound quality will be considerably worse than pretty much every other option
I get the appeal: PC speaker output would work in a pinch on most PCs, without requiring any other hardware.
But if you think about it further:
- On PCs that are new enough to have enough cycles to spare for this have better built-in sound output devices that would make more sense to support anyway (AC'97 ICHx or Intel HDA).
- Older PCs and laptops for which SBEMU could also be useful (notably desktop systems with MCA slots or older laptops without built-in sound cards) would almost certainly have a parallel port anyway, which would make more sense to support with a cheap Covox-like LPT DAC device as well. Especially since such older systems would likely suffer a considerable performance impact when driving the PC speaker as a PCM output device.
I wouldn't outright say no to this feature request, but I wouldn't prioritize it either. Even LPT DAC (Covox) support would be more interesting to get done first, IMO.
Pull Requests are always welcome, though. :slightly_smiling_face:
