alt Hacker NewsOne of my favourite DOS era inventions is Access Software's RealSound™ technology which performed audio modulation of the PC speaker to produce okay sounding audio playback, about telephone quality.
The manual hilariously instructs you to hook your hifi system up to the PC speaker, see the last page:
https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS//Ma...
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An example of how RealSound sounded: https://youtu.be/havf3yw0qyw
Edit:
This sent me down a rabbit hole and I found this nice video about PC speaker history: https://youtu.be/jD4m9JvLy2Y
I recall having "Pinball Dreams" also similar (same?) tech - the soundtrack through the speaker was quite good!
I don't remember which software I used, I don't specifically recall it being realsound, but I had a soundblaster emulator driver that used the pc speaker that wasn't half bad. Got me through hours of Kings Quest and Space Quest. I also used a driver that made the computer think my monochrome monitor had CGA capabilities.
"Can't be too happy about that one!" I always loved the speech in World Class Leader Board Golf!
Except those #$!@# patented it. We were doing the same thing before them even going back to the Apple II. I described it to my father and he said it was an obvious technique.
Star Control II was released in 1992, a year before Doom, and it was able to play beautiful, rich 4-channel MOD music via PC speaker, on a 80386 @ 40Mhz.
Scream Tracker, a music composition software, was able to pull of the same feat, 4 channels of 8-bit voices, in 1990.
However cool and useful the PC speaker output was, it was the a hand-soldered "Covox" lookalike, a passive DAC built out of a resistor ladder and attached to the printer port, which you actually connected to your hi-fi amplifier.