DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music
36 comments
·December 2, 2025suprjami
nine_k
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.
suprjami
No, RealSound was not a Covox-like hardware dongle. It was PC speaker only. Play the first few minutes of Mean Streets or Martian Memorandum or Countdown in DOSBox and you'll hear it.
bananaboy
"Can't be too happy about that one!" I always loved the speech in World Class Leader Board Golf!
djmips
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.
jasongill
This is a cool technical feat, but I am almost sure that id attempted this and realized that it just was not ever going to sound very good. The PC speaker sound effects are bad enough (which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad") and sound "cheap", and adding beep-speaker music on top of that would just result in a noisy mess - as evidenced by the video.
The beep-speaker music in Commander Keen was good and fit the theme of the game - but to keep the environment of Doom and the dark and moody feel and not be limited to the dulcet tones of a tiny piezo buzzer was a design decision, not being lazy.
Note that they could have supported Disney Sound Source / Covax Speech Thing style audio (they did in Wolf3D and Keen) but skipped that as well, likely for the same reason - it would have sounded like murky hollow garbage.
You can email John Romero and ask him, he responds to emails - my guess is that he will say "yeah we considered it, it sounded bad, we abandoned the idea" not that they were lazy. If you read about the run up to Doom's release, and the amount of crunch time they were putting in, they were anything but lazy!
justsomehnguy
> The PC speaker sound effects are bad enough (which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad") and sound "cheap"
They are lifted as is from Shadow Knights.
> which is to say "as good as they can be, but still bad"
They could be done better or even way better, it's just that wasn't an important target in any way. Especially considering the performance target of 486DX+ whicih wasn't not a cheap machine in any way in 1993.
AnotherGoodName
Honestly everyone that’s actually heard pc speaker audio done well is shocked at the unexpectedly high quality of it. Star Control 2 being a shining example. Don’t judge it by the poor examples, judge pc audio by the great ones. Its surprisingly good.
minki_the_avali
Honestly, the design aspect really wasn't something I had considered, It definitively does make a lot of sense. Still sad though that it didn't officially happen. So far, all the arguments I had seen against it where purely about the performance, which in my testing isn't really a big factor for this.
jasongill
Doom is playable (albeit by reducing the viewport to a postage stamp) on a 386; I'd be curious how your patch works on the 386 considering how much worse the graphics performance is on it
unsnap_biceps
While this is a wonderful technical feat, I think it's not nearly as playable. The video shows that it doesn't mix the gameplay sounds with the music track, so it pauses the music every time to play a sound (gun shot, door opening, item pick up, etc). This is really distracting compared to the adlib driver that mixes them together and so the music doesn't stop/start harshly. And IIRC, the adlib music is quieter then the effects, which also helps the music stay as background sounds. I don't think Id was lazy, just thinking about the full experience.
russdill
As someone who grew up on PC speaker, it's actually really good. The main thing is the item sound effects need some tweaking to be less distracting, probably just shorter. It might also do good to just skip certain unimportant sound effects completely.
null
bitwize
A lot of PC games worked this way. Nintendo games even temporarily dropped music voices (typically preferring the second square wave voice, then the first) to play sound effects. If you found it too distracting, presumably the music could be muted.
BearOso
> Nintendo games even temporarily dropped music voices (typically preferring the second square wave voice, then the first) to play sound effects.
This even happened on the SNES. A few Square games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 have tracks that are noticeably missing a music channel when playing sound effects. It wasn't totally necessary to use all the channels, but they were very adamant about their music quality.
paulryanrogers
Not bad.
I recall a special Windows 3 driver could push sound effects and music through PC speakers, at least those which were an actual small speaker embedded in the case. It was very rough and mono but a neat trick. I don't think it worked with the coin sized beepers in older models.
booleanbetrayal
I remember this driver and relied on it for a few years. Was sort of amazing, all things considered.
AnotherGoodName
For a game that did this incredibly well look at Star Control 2.
Amazing .mod based techno music via pc speaker that mixed in sound effects, even including short vocal clips (pkunk insults). All running on a humble 286 which played the game well while managing this. For those that say this was a choice due to poor pc speaker quality the toys for bob engineers pulled it off with incredible results years prior.
It was just a pain to do.
-warren
I'm going to date myself here. In 199x, we had a 286 and loved a game called "Command HQ" that had lovely gameplay and sound to boot! Then we got the ol' Packard bell 486 with a sound blaster. We played the same game (which had midi output too) for the first time and my father and I cried -- it was unbelievable.
That's when I first became enamoured with the "art of the possible" and this has driven my career.
I fully believe that doom could have had pc speaker sound; after all w3d did!
NBJack
Interesting title, but folks seem to forget the double-digit MHz processors straining to hit 30 FPS back then on Doom unless it was in a smaller rendering size. This would have killed the performance even on my mighty 486 running at 33 MHz at the time (I don't have a lot of faith in the VM demo). It remains to be seen if the music files are small enough to keep the game to its original ~2 x 1.44MB installation disk size.
Still neat.
I recall Windows 3.1 was sometimes shipped with a speaker driver that could emulate a very basic audio card on a traditional PC speaker almost entirely in software.
karim79
Is anyone here old enough to remember Access Software and their RealSound[0] tech? For a short time I thought that was going to be as good as it gets for PCs, until I got my first Sound Blaster (8 bit)
nubinetwork
I thought it already had beeper speaker music, but everyone had at least a sb16...?
mbirth
Sounds like a 3D Commander Keen.
slipheen
What a beautiful bit of hacking! This is awesome, and made my day to see :) It sounded -much- better than I would have guessed!
One 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...