this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast " Error" during startup to be infinitely more helpful.
I don't think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that's about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.
I had an Athlon motherboard with voice POST messages… one night I woke up to it saying “your CPU has a problem!” over and over and was freaked out until I was completely awake and figure out what was wrong.
It wasn’t high quality coming through the piezo speaker, but it was good enough.
I definitely remember short 2 or 3 second clips of relatively high quality music being played through our family's IBM XT's motherboard speaker at one point using a demo we got from a BBS or the Public Domain Software site in the mid-80s. It wasn't easy but some madman made a proof-of-concept that did it and it was incredible at the time.
Ohhhh right. Well its worth the <$1 of input costs.
That would be way more complex to have the motherboard play than a sequence of beeps at different frequencies. Especially at the time.
You could just about play speech using one bit output using pulse-width-modulation. But it was almost unrecognizable. And would take a lot of memory for the time.
It was usual to have different numbers of beeps for POST errors.
But this was an age when a PC would say "Keyboard error. Press any key to continue", so things were not thought out that well.
If your keyboard was actually working, you pressed a key. If it was not working, you went to get new keyboard. What is "not thought through" about that?
But you're not allowed to proceed in life until you've pressed any key!
Fair
Would any of your tech-handicapped relatives actually pay it any attention, though?
Yes
Can we trade relatives?
Tip: be passive aggressive and sarcastic when helping them. It both teaches them the solution in a memorable way, makes them not want to get help from you again, AND makes them think twice before doing so.
No
"my shits fucked yo"