[suggestion] using the pcspeaker as an audio output

[MFDGaming]

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

[volkertb]

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. 🙂