vwestlife
Veteran Member
Somehow I remembered an old DOS demo called "ATOM.EXE". A check through my disk collection turned up nothing, and it's nowhere to be found on the web. Finally, I found it the old fashioned way: through a USENET binary!
It's mostly a demo of playing digitized audio (a short music clip) through the ordinary PC speaker. According to the demo's text scroll, the audio is 1-bit at 12000 Hz (mono) -- for comparison, full CD-quality audio is 16-bit at 44100 Hz (x 2 channels for stereo). The entire program, including embedded digital audio sample, is only 23K in size!
I'm not sure how much processing power this demo requires. On USENET, one person referred to playing it on a Tandy 1000SX, which is a 7.16 MHz 8088, and the text in the demo itself implies that a 386SX is more than enough power to run it. I recorded a video clip of it from my Compaq PIII-850 laptop, which certainly had much power to spare, but provides a convenient composite video output and PC speaker audio through the line-out jack. I'm quite surprised just how clear the 80x25 color text is through my old Matrox video capture card's composite input -- there's no "color bleed" at all, and you can actually still read the text even on the YouTube clip that I made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HstgfH9FWV4
I stopped the demo after about four minutes, otherwise it would just keep going and going. What you don't see is that it blinks the keyboard and floppy drive LEDs in time to the music!
It's mostly a demo of playing digitized audio (a short music clip) through the ordinary PC speaker. According to the demo's text scroll, the audio is 1-bit at 12000 Hz (mono) -- for comparison, full CD-quality audio is 16-bit at 44100 Hz (x 2 channels for stereo). The entire program, including embedded digital audio sample, is only 23K in size!
I'm not sure how much processing power this demo requires. On USENET, one person referred to playing it on a Tandy 1000SX, which is a 7.16 MHz 8088, and the text in the demo itself implies that a 386SX is more than enough power to run it. I recorded a video clip of it from my Compaq PIII-850 laptop, which certainly had much power to spare, but provides a convenient composite video output and PC speaker audio through the line-out jack. I'm quite surprised just how clear the 80x25 color text is through my old Matrox video capture card's composite input -- there's no "color bleed" at all, and you can actually still read the text even on the YouTube clip that I made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HstgfH9FWV4
I stopped the demo after about four minutes, otherwise it would just keep going and going. What you don't see is that it blinks the keyboard and floppy drive LEDs in time to the music!