The Monkey Island (TM) PC-Speaker music player

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2021-07-27 11:30:07

To be clear, I am talking about a game. But not just any game... There are too many things one can say about Monkey Island - one of them, is that it is included in the list of the best games ever (if you haven't played it, you should seriously consider trying it out).

DOSBox is one of the programs that do just that: it emulates DOS machines almost perfectly, allowing old-timers like me to relive their DOS days - and use the data from the original diskette of Monkey Island :-)

Since DOSBox is open-source, the adventure begun by hunting for the frequency-driving code of the PC Speaker. It was relatively easy: in good old PCs, the speaker was driven by the Programmable Interval Timer (PIT) - so after slightly modifying DOSBox's timer-handling code...

I proceeded to chop the notes down into individual songs... (which was rather easy, thanks to prolonged silence periods between them)