Posts: 35
Threads: 13
Joined: Dec 2005
I came upon a few programming examples a while back, that demonstrated FM synth music in Qbasic.
(finally breaking away from PLAY)
I put this into my program and the quality was fine, but I recently upgraded my computer to a windows 2000 from windows 98 SE,
and to my dismay, the sounds didn't seem to com through any more, is this a problem with my program?
Is this program not compatible with win2k?
link -
http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~bergmann/soundblaster.html
is there a better way?
Posts: 29
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Joined: Dec 2005
That source you have posted uses the OUT command which, if I remember correctly, doesn't work too well under WIN2K or XP.
You could try QBSound here....
http://www.petesqbsite.com/downloads/sound.shtml
which will somewhat do what you want
Or you could try to use Freebasic, it has some libraries that deal with sound and graphics, and it's free....
Posts: 108
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Joined: Jan 2006
Old style FM synth on a PC is accomplished using a timer chip on the mother board that can be configured to control the PC speaker. The timer works on a count down principle. It is loaded with a number, then begins to count down at a certain rate. The chip can be setup to toggle the speaker line every time it hits zero. By changing the initial count, you can control the frequency, thereby performing frequency modulation. This involves code that directly manipulates I/O ports. Windows, however, uses the timer for a number of things, so it sort of fences off access to the I/O ports. Intel chips running in protected mode provide operating systems the capability to catch attempts to access certain I/O ports and emulate legacy functionality.
If you know how to use the Windows device manager, check the system speaker, under system devices, and see if it is enabled. You may also want to check to see if you have the legacy sound decive driver installed. This may not be the cause of your problem, but it is a good place to start.
