When the original IBM Personal Computer was released in 1981, it came with a single channel, square wave, blipper - known as the "PIT" or "Programmable Interrupt Timer" - aka. the Intel 8253/8254 chip. This chip played single channel, square wave audio, and was generally intended just to spit out audible diagnostic codes should the machine fail, give a confirmation beep within a business program, and maybe a few rudimentary sound effects for entertainment in between tasks. This carried over to all PC iterations, until today.
Vintage Sound Standards
Here's the list of vintage PC sound standards and a table (with links added as I create them) to discuss each type of standard, as well as some non-standard stuff as well.
| SUBJECT
| DESCRIPTION
|
PC Speaker (PIT)
| The original PC Sound format is the IBM "PC Speaker", basically a single voice, single channel, square wave audio generator that's a part of the Programmable Interrupt Timer (PIT) Chip on the motherboard. THe orignial intention was just to make brief beep noises to allow the machine to communicate with technicians and users, but eventually it was leveraged for audio in PC games because it could be more elaborately programmed. Despite it's humble and dare-I-say, somewhat weak general usability, it it surprisling capable and effective in the hands of a skilled developer.
|
PC Jr/Tandy 1000 3-voice
| In 1983, IBM introduced A "home version" of the PC known as the IBM 4860 PC Junior. And a major part of the IBM PC Juniors audio was a Texas instruments SN76489 Programmable sound generator - which gave it far more audio capabilities than the bog-standard PC. Tandy (Radio Shack) decided to clone the PC Jr. and it was set for release just as it was about to fail, so while they focused on the PC aspect, the Junior aspects remained.
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Creative Labs GameBlaster
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Adlib
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Creative Labs SoundBlaster Series
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Windows Sound System (WSS)
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The Windows Sound System (WSS) Page
Stupid Experiments In Laptop SoundBlaster on the Cheap - Panasonic KXL-D20
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