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SPEAKER DEVICE DRIVER
DRVSPKR.SYS
User's Guide
Version of November 13, 1986
Preface
The loudspeaker provided on an IBM PC, XT and AT
computer is capable of a variety of audible outputs in
addition to the normal "beep". However, there is
little or no supporting software provided in MS/DOS to
allow a program to make use of this capability.
In addition, the normal "beep" is a completely
processor-intensive operation, resulting in very er-
ratic operation of programs which occasionally have to
do a beep. An example is DBASE III, which beeps at the
end of an input field. Normally, such a beep ties up
the processor, such that it can do nothing else during
that time. If several beeps have been queued, the wait
for all of these to finish can be quite an annoyance.
This document describes the Speaker Device Driver,
which provides a solution to these problems.
Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION...................................1
1.1 The ShareWare Concept........................1
1.1.1 What You Can Do...........................1
1.1.2 What You Cannot Do........................2
1.1.3 What You Should Do........................2
2. INSTALLING THE SPEAKER DEVICE DRIVER...........4
2.1 Installing the Driver File...................4
2.2 Modifying Your CONFIG.SYS File...............4
3. FACILITIES OF THE SPEAKER DEVICE DRIVER........6
3.1 Checking Out Your Beep.......................6
3.2 Interrupt-Driven Operation...................7
3.3 Multiple Beep Suppression....................7
3.4 Non-Processor-Speed Dependent................8
3.5 Making A Beep................................8
3.6 Changing the Sound of Your Beep..............9
3.7 Producing a Sequence of Tones................9
3.8 Buffered Tone Generation....................10
3.9 A New Device................................10
4. SPEAKER DEVICE DRIVER COMMANDS................11
4.1 The Basics..................................11
4.2 Commands Available..........................12
4.2.1 F - Frequency............................12
4.2.2 G - Gap..................................12
4.2.3 D - Duration of Each Tone................13
4.2.4 T - Tempo................................13
4.2.5 P - Pause................................14
4.2.6 R - Resume...............................14
4.2.7 B - Begin Recording......................15
4.2.8 E - End Recording........................15
4.2.9 Unrecognized Commands....................15
4.2.10 Controlling the Volume..................15
4.2.11 Chords..................................16
5. HOW TO CONFIGURE YOUR BEEP....................17
5.1 Several More Example Beeps..................17
6. SENDING COMMANDS TO THE DRIVER................19
6.1 From A Program..............................19
6.2 From the Console Keyboard...................19
6.3 From a File.................................20
6.3.1 Sending Other Sequences..................21
6.4 Testing Your Beep...........................21
7. ABOUT THE AUTHOR..............................23
i
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
1. INTRODUCTION
The loudspeaker provided on an IBM PC, XT and AT
computer is capable of a variety of audible outputs in
addition to the normal "beep". However, there is little
or no supporting software provided in MS/DOS to allow a
program to make use of this capability.
In addition, the normal "beep" is a completely
processor-intensive operation, resulting in very erratic
operation of programs which occasionally have to do a
beep. An example is DBASE III, which beeps at the end of
an input field. Normally, such a beep ties up the
processor, such that it can do nothing else during that
time. If several beeps have been queued, the wait for
all of these to finish can be quite an annoyance. This
is even more of a problem when you are are on-line to
some other computer. The beeps that you receive normally
tie up your communications software, slowing down your
communications and in extreme cases causing data loss due
to buffer overrun.
This document describes the Speaker Device Driver,
which provides a solution to these problems.
1.1 The ShareWare Concept
The "ShareWare" concept is basically an experiment
in the marketing and distribution of software. It at-
tempts to cut down on distribution and marketing expenses
so that quality software can be made widely available at
the lowest possible price. This concept also makes it
possible for users to try the software before they decide
to keep (and, hopefully, pay) for it. This is very handy
in a world full of competing packages!
1.1.1 What You Can Do
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:38:47 -1-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
This software is being placed into the public domain
as "ShareWare". This means that you are encouraged to
copy this software and give it to your friends and/or
business associates. You may also use it in a commercial
environment. However, you may not sell the software for
more than the cost of the diskette and a small handling
charge. If you paid more than five or ten dollars for
the diskette with this software on it, you have been
cheated! Please advise the program's author (my address
appears at the end of this document) of the price you
paid, when, and from whom you purchased it.
If you distribute a copy of this software to anyone
else, you must distribute it complete and unchanged. You
must not change the program, the user's guide, or any of
the other files on the diskette. (You are permitted to
add additional files on the diskette if you like, as long
as you clearly identify yourself in the files you add,
along with the date you add those files to the diskette).
You will find, especially if you have a hard disk,
that this is a product you will use literally every day.
1.1.2 What You Cannot Do
As just mentioned, you cannot modify or delete any
of the files you find on the diskette when you give a
copy of it to anyone else. If you base a product on this
one, which you intend to sell for profit, you must make
arrangements for such use with me first. Extremely
reasonable licensing terms for such use are available.
1.1.3 What You Should Do
If you end up liking and using this product (and you
will), you should make a contribution to the program's
author at the address found later on in this document.
By doing so, I can keep you posted on revisions and im-
provements to this Speaker Device Driver as they become
available. I can also let you know about other useful
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:38:54 -2-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
software products as they become available from time to
time. A contribution of ten dollars is suggested, but
you may want to make it fifteen or twenty if you end up
using the product a lot. Use your discretion based upon
what the product turns out to be worth to you, just as
you would if you were leaving a tip in a nice restaurant.
It is these contributions which will make it pos-
sible to continue to develop this and other interesting
software products for you to use in the future.
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:02 -3-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
2. INSTALLING THE SPEAKER DEVICE DRIVER
The speaker device driver is provided as a single
file named "DRVSPKR.SYS".
2.1 Installing the Driver File
The file "DRVSPKR.SYS" should be placed in the root
directory of the drive from which MS/DOS will boot up.
For instance, if you have received the speaker driver on
a diskette, and that diskette is in your "a:" diskette
drive, execute the command:
COPY A:DRVSPKR.SYS C:\DRVSPKR.SYS
If your hard drive is something other than drive C,
then of course you would replace the C: above with the
drive letter corresponding to your hard drive.
2.2 Modifying Your CONFIG.SYS File
Once the device driver is installed on your hard
disk, the next step is to tell MS/DOS that you want the
system to install the driver each time it comes up. To
do this, you must edit the file in your root directory
called "CONFIG.SYS". Specific instructions for doing
this will, of course, depend upon what editor you prefer
to use. However, you will want to add a line to your
"CONFIG.SYS" file which says:
DEVICE=DRVSPKR.SYS
Once you have done this, and rewritten the CON-
FIG.SYS file to your disk, you should reboot your
machine. From this point on, every time you reboot, the
Speaker Device Driver will automatically be available for
your use.
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:05 -4-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
Perhaps the simplest way to add this line to your
CONFIG.SYS file is to enter the command line:
ECHO DEVICE=DRVSPKR.SYS >>\CONFIG.SYS
If you use the command line just above, be sure that
you use two of the right-pointy-brackets. This causes
the new line to be added at the end of your existing CON-
FIG.SYS file. If you use only one, you will completely
overwrite any existing CONFIG.SYS file that you might al-
ready have.
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:11 -5-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
3. FACILITIES PROVIDED BY THE SPEAKER DEVICE DRIVER
Once you have installed the Speaker Device Driver as
described in the previous chapter, you have several new
things that you may notice.
3.1 Checking Out Your Beep
The first thing that you might notice is that the
way your machine sounds when it makes a "beep" is prob-
ably different. You can check this by entering the com-
mand line:
ECHO ^G
This will tell your machine to make a single beep.
It is even a better demonstration if you tell it to make
several beeps:
ECHO ^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G
The terminology in the lines above, "^G", does not
indicate that you should type the two characters "^" and
"G", (although it will echo to your display the same as
if you did!). Instead, what this means is to press and
hold down the Control key (probably labelled "Ctrl"), and
while it is held down, then also pressing the "G" key.
You will observe that the result will display as "^G" as
shown on the above command line.
When you then press the ENTER key, your machine
should beep. If you try this before you install the
speaker device driver, you will notice that there is a
distinct pause before the regular MS/DOS prompt returns.
In the longer example where you type a bunch of Control-
G's, the pause will be quite long! However, once the
speaker device driver is installed, that pause should
disappear.
This is because the Speaker Device Driver is
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:14 -6-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
"interrupt-driven".
3.2 Interrupt-Driven Operation
Normally, when the PC (or XT or AT) makes a beep or
other sound, it is sitting in a tight program loop, com-
pletely busy, moving the speaker cone back and forth to
produce the sound that you hear. However, the designers
of the PC made it possible to tell the machine's hardware
to produce the sound by itself, allowing the program to
go on ahead doing more useful work.
The speaker device driver hooks into MS/DOS's timer
interrupt. This interrupt, which occurs about eighteen
times per second, allows the speaker device driver to get
control every once in a while. (Don't worry about just
how this happens, it is quite automatic and invisible!
And, the speaker device driver uses an extremely small
amount of processor time, so that it will not affect the
execution time of your other programs).
The speaker device driver, when it gets control
about eighteen times per second, can do one of three
things. It can do nothing (the usual case), or turn the
speaker "on" (to make it start producing a tone), or turn
the speaker "off", stopping the tone it had been produc-
ing.
During the rest of the time, the speaker is either
turned off or producing a tone, while your programs con-
tinue to run normally. With the speaker driver in-
stalled, they no longer have to pause when they have to
make a beep.
3.3 Multiple Beep Suppression
You have probably experienced cases where the
program you were running decided to produce several
beeps. (This can happen, for example, if you have keyed
ahead several characters, which turn out to be invalid,
and your program beeps once for each invalid character it
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:20 -7-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
receives). Sometimes, you have to wait quite a long time
until all the beeps for the queued-up characters have
been sounded, before you can continue.
This can be especially frustrating if you are online
to some service such as CompuServe, and somebody on the
CB channel broadcasts a message containing a while bunch
of "beep" commands in a row!
The speaker device driver, besides allowing your
program to continue while the beeps take place, also
automatically suppresses multiple "beep" commands that
are received in rapid succession. (In other words,
"beep" commands are not queued).
3.4 Non-Processor-Speed Dependent
The fact that the speaker device driver is driven
from the timer interrupt, which occurs at a fixed rate,
also means that the way its beep sounds does not change
if the speed of your processor changes. You may have
noticed that some programs' beeps change frequency
depending on whether they are running on a PC XT, or an
AT, which is faster. Likewise, some programs which make
sounds will sound different if you have an accelerator
(or "turbo") board, or the like. These changes will not
affect the speaker device driver. It should sound just
the same, regardless of how fast (or slow) your processor
runs.
3.5 Making A Beep
Nearly every program which runs under MS/DOS makes
its beeps by calling a routine in the ROM BIOS provided
as part of the basic programming of every PC-compatible
machine. Programs make such a beep by displaying an AS-
CII "BELL" character (so called because it used to ring
an actual, mechanical bell on the old-fashioned mechani-
cal terminals). This character is a binary 7, which also
happens to be a "Control-G".
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:28 -8-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
The speaker device driver intercepts calls to the
ROM BIOS that tell it to make a beep (by sending a binary
7, or ASCII "BELL" character) and performs those itself,
instead. All characters other than the ASCII "BELL"
character are passed along to the ROM BIOS, as normal.
3.6 Changing the Sound of Your Beep
Besides making your machine's beeps take less time
away from your program, the speaker device driver allows
you to redefine the way your machine's beep sounds. You
can make it longer, shorter, higher, or lower. You can
make the beeps happen quite close together, such that
they are almost one continuous tone, or you can space
them apart, so they have a silent gap in between.
You can also change the beep such that it is com-
posed of more than one frequency. This can be useful if,
for example, you do not hear certain frequencies very
well. You can make a beep which is composed of several
frequencies, perhaps rising, perhaps lowering, perhaps in
an alternating sequence or even as sort of a warbling
sound.
Personalizing your beep also allows you to tell, if
you have several processors in the same room, which one
it was that made a beep.
Some programs make their own beeps, usually in the
same slow way that the ROM BIOS normally does. Since
such programs do not use the ROM BIOS, these beeps cannot
be intercepted by the speaker device driver. However,
their unchanged tone will tell you immediately which
programs these are!
How to configure your beep to suit your preferences
will be described in a later chapter.
3.7 Producing a Sequence of Tones
In fact, the speaker device driver is capable of
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:35 -9-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
producing nearly any sequence of tones you like, much
more than just a "beep". You could actually program the
speaker device driver to play music, if you wanted to.
And, while it is doing that, you can continue to edit
files, compile programs, and whatever, just as you would
use your machine normally.
3.8 Buffered Tone Generation
The reason you can play music while your machine
runs other programs is because the speaker device driver
contains a relatively large buffer which allows it to
"queue" long sequences of commands. This permits several
tone generation commands to be sent to the speaker device
driver, even if it has not finished the commands it has
already received, without forcing the program sending the
commands to wait.
3.9 A New Device
You can use the speaker device driver from nearly
any language or program you like, since the speaker
device driver adds a new device name to your computer
system. Just as you can tell most programs to write
their output to CON: to send it to the console display,
or to LPT1: or PRN: to send it to your printer, you now
have another device called SPKR: which allows you to
write commands to the speaker device driver.
Supporting the loudspeaker with a device driver
means that you can open the loudspeaker like a file and
write commands to it from nearly any language or program
you like.
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:43 -10-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
4. SPEAKER DEVICE DRIVER COMMANDS
You do not have to understand the command sequences
described in this chapter to use the speaker device
driver. You can just install it and use it to eliminate
those frustrating delays while your programs "get the
beeps out of their system"!
However, by understanding how to control the speaker
device driver, you can make it do a lot of other useful
things, too. Besides, it's a lot of fun!
4.1 The Basics
Basically, most speaker device driver commands con-
sist of ASCII alphabetic characters (letters of the
alphabet). Sometimes, these are preceded by numbers,
which can be one or more digits long, based on the
specific command. All numbers sent to the driver are
converted to a maximum sixteen-bit (unsigned) binary num-
ber, allowing values of theoretically as high as 65535,
although most commands do not use values that big. Any
non-printing characters (such as carriage return, line
feed, or form feed) that somehow get sent to the speaker
device driver are simply discarded.
The actual alphabetic command characters can be sent
in either upper or lower case letters, the speaker device
driver does not care either way.
Since each alphabetic character terminates a com-
mand, there is no need for blanks, commas or other
characters to separate commands. You can just send them
adjacent to each other. Or, you might want to include
spaces between individual components of a command string
to improve the readability.
Some commands take effect as soon as they are
received, but other commands just get "remembered" and
are used to control the way that subsequently produced
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:49 -11-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
tones sound.
4.2 Commands Available
The following sections describe the individual com-
mands. All commands are buffered and take effect "when
it is their turn", unless otherwise noted in the descrip-
tion of that command.
4.2.1 F - Frequency
This command letter causes a tone to be produced at
the "current frequency". The initial "current frequency"
when the speaker device driver gets loaded, during your
DOS bootstrap, is 1000Hz. (This is a typical frequency
for a "beep"). Note, however, that since the speaker
device driver does not get re-initialized just because
you change programs, your program should not assume that
the "current frequency" is still set to 1000Hz, since it
could have been changed by a previous program.
To change the "current frequency" to a different
value, put the frequency desired, as a number, im-
mediately preceding the "F" or "f" character. For ex-
ample, to produce a tone of 1500Hz, you would write
1500F
to the speaker device driver. The "F" command by
itself will produce another tone of the same frequency as
was produced by the last "F" command.
4.2.2 G - Gap
This command letter sets the number of timer ticks
(there are approximately eighteen timer ticks per second)
of silent time between individual tones. The number of
timer ticks between tones is specified as a number im-
mediately preceding the "G" or "g" character. Typical
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:39:56 -12-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
values range from 0, the initial default value, to twenty
or so, although larger values can be specified. For ex-
ample, if you want your beeps separated by a short gap,
you could send the command:
2g
to the speaker device driver. Note that you only
need to send this command once, whenever you want to
change the gap's duration. The gap will then be inserted
by the speaker device driver at the end of each tone it
generates, until you change the gap again.
4.2.3 D - Duration of Each Tone
This command letter tells the speaker device driver
how many timer ticks long each tone should be. Like the
Gap command, this command produces no tones of its own.
It merely is used to set the value which will determine
the length of tones produced by the following "F" com-
mands. For example, to make each tone last about a third
of a second, you would send the command:
6d
to the speaker device driver. The default duration,
when the driver is loaded, is five timer ticks.
4.2.4 T - Tempo
The value for tempo is used to scale the duration of
each tone. This allows you to "globally" change the
duration of a series of tones, without having to change
each of the individual duration commands that might be
contained in the sequence.
A tempo value of 256 indicates a "normal" tempo,
where "256t5d600f" would produce a 600Hz tone for a dura-
tion of five timer ticks. To change the tempo to make it
faster, the command "128t5d600f" would produce a 600Hz
tone for a duration of two or three timer ticks. In-
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:40:03 -13-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
creasing the value in a command like "512t5d600f" would
produce a 600Hz tone for a duration of ten timer ticks,
and so forth.
Again, the tempo value affects all following tones.
Larger "tempo" values make the durations longer than
their normal times, smaller "tempo" values make the tone
durations shorter than their normal times. Since the
duration of gaps is usally quite short, changing the
tempo value does not affect the duration of gaps. If you
do change the "tempo" value from its default value of
256, it is only polite to remember to restore it to its
previous value before your program returns to DOS!
4.2.5 P - Pause
This is a strange command because it takes effect
immediately, and is not buffered. When it is received by
the driver, it causes it to not fetch any new commands
from its buffer for up to about five seconds (or until it
receives a "Resume" command, see below), whichever hap-
pens first. This command is not usually necessary, so
don't worry if you don't understand it.
4.2.6 R - Resume
This strange command, like Pause, is not stored into
the internal buffer used by the speaker device driver,
but takes effect immediately. It causes the fetching of
commands from the device driver's buffer to be resumed,
allowing it to resume generating tones. Note that, if no
resume command follows a pause command, the pause will
time out anyway after about five seconds.
The pause and resume commands allow you to make sure
that several commands are loaded into the buffer before
the first one of them begins executing, in case your
program generates the commands rather slowly to the
driver, but you want the commands to execute faster than
you can send them.
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:40:09 -14-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
4.2.7 B - Begin Recording
This command tells the speaker device driver that
the following commands are not to be acted on at once,
but rather that they are to be recorded in its memory
area for later use. The commands that are recorded in
this fashion are "played back" whenever a program wants a
"beep".
The memory area set aside for the recording is about
128 bytes long. If you try to record a sequence of com-
mands longer than this, the driver will reset the beep
back to the default (which is a single "f" command) and
stop the recording.
4.2.8 E - End Recording
This command is used to tell the speaker device
driver that the commands preceding comprise the complete
sequence to be used when it is asked to produce a "beep".
For example, if you want to reconfigure your beep to be a
1000Hz tone that is four timer ticks long, with two timer
ticks worth of gap between each beep, you would send the
command string:
b2g4d1000fe
The possibilities are nearly endless. However,
several more examples of beeps you can configure will be
described in the next chapter.
4.2.9 Unrecognized Commands
Any commands which are unrecognized cause the
speaker device driver to produce a clicking sound.
4.2.10 Controlling the Volume
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:40:17 -15-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
Unfortunately, the PC has no mechanism to allow for
the control of the volume level from its speaker.
4.2.11 Chords
The PC's sound generator normally produces one
frequency at a time, as what is called a "square wave".
Any attempt to produce different "simultaneous"
frequencies (chords), or other more sophisticated tones,
would require constant (and continuous) attention from
the processor, which is just the kind of delays that the
speaker device driver was written to eliminate. Sorry.
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:40:23 -16-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
5. HOW TO CONFIGURE YOUR BEEP
In the previous chapter, how to configure your beep
to be a fairly normal one was described. In this chap-
ter, several other possible beeps will be described,
along with examples of the command strings that configure
them.
5.1 Several More Example Beeps
If you wanted your beep to be two short beeps
separated by a longer gap, you could send the command:
b2g2d1000f5dfe
If you wanted a beep which alternated between two
tones, you could send the command:
b0g3d400f1400f400f3g1400fe
Notice in the above command string that we have told
it there should not be a gap between the four tones
produced (there are four tones because the command con-
tains four "f" commands, each of which produces one
tone). The second Gap command, "3g" must appear BEFORE
the final "f" command, if the three timer tick gap indi-
cated is to take effect following the last of the four
tones. Remember that each "f" command causes a tone of
the current frequency, for the current duration (possibly
modified by the current tempo), followed by the current
gap.
Since you are allowed approximately 128 bytes to
store the definition of your personal beep, you can see
that you can make your own beep quite elaborate if you so
desire.
As one final example, if you wanted a beep which was
composed of three different frequencies, separated by
different lengths of gaps, you could specify a command:
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:40:26 -17-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
b1g2d800f2g1200f6g2400fe
By now you should be getting the idea. The best way
to get a feel for how it works is to play with it a
while, and it's fun to do that, anyway. Next, we'll
describe one way to do just that.
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:40:33 -18-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
6. SENDING COMMANDS TO THE DRIVER
This section will describe several ways you can send
commands to the speaker device driver.
6.1 From A Program
You can, as previously mentioned, send commands to
the speaker device driver from any program you write,
written in nearly any imaginable language. Normally, the
way to do this is to open a file with the name "SPKR:"
(some languages prefer it without the ":" at the end) and
write the command to it.
NOTE: With some languages, you may have to close
the file to force the data to be written to the driver if
you want the command to take effect immediately, since
some languages don't write their output until their file
buffer fills up, or until they close their files just
before returning to the operating system upon completion.
6.2 From the Console Keyboard
If all you want to do is to experiment with the
driver, you don't have to write a special program just to
do that. Here's one way (there are many other ways which
would work as well).
To send a command to the driver, at the DOS prompt,
enter:
COPY CON: SPKR:
<put your command you want to try here>
^Z
Note that, like before, the final line "^Z" means to
hold down the "Ctrl" key while you press the "Z" key.
When you press this "Control-Z", the command on the pre-
Rev. November 13, 1986 23:40:35 -19-
Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
vious line will be sent to the driver, and you should
hear whatever the result will be.
For example, you can configure your beep from your
keyboard by entering the commands at the DOS prompt:
COPY CON: SPKR:
b3g5d660fe
^Z
Note that the above command does not let you hear
the new beep you have configured, it just records it so
it can be played back later. If you just wanted to try
possible command strings, you could test the above
sequence to see if it is the way you wanted it by
entering:
COPY CON: SPKR:
3g5d660f
^Z
If you wanted to hear it the way it would be
repeated, with the gaps between several beeps, you could
enter:
COPY CON: SPKR:
3g5d660ffff
^Z
6.3 From a File
Once you have found a beep that is uniquely "you",
you will probably want to have it be set up automatically
every time your machine reboots. To do this, just write
the beep command string you like to a file. You can do
this with any editor of your choice, or again you could
just use copy:
COPY CON: MYBEEP.TXT
b<your favorite beep sequence>e
^Z
You can confirm that it has been stored correctly on
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Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
disk by keying the command:
TYPE MYBEEP.TXT
and the result should be the beep command you en-
tered. Then, edit your \AUTOEXEC.BAT file and put in the
command:
COPY MYBEEP.TXT SPKR:
After doing this, each time your computer gets
rebooted, it will automatically configure your beep to
sound just the way you want it to.
6.3.1 Sending Other Sequences
You can, of course, send sequences other than those
which configure your beep from a disk file to the speaker
device driver. In fact, you could write an entire musi-
cal selection as a series of device driver commands and
store them into a file. Copying this file to the device
SPKR: as in the way just described will start the musical
selection playing, and you can go ahead to do whatever
you want with your computer while the selection plays.
Although the buffer in the speaker device driver is
quite large, it is not infinite. If you send extremely
long command sequences to the speaker device driver, it
is possible that you will fill the buffer completely
full. In this case, the program sending to the buffer
will automatically wait until there is room enough in the
buffer for it to finish sending everything.
Sending other command sequences to the speaker
device driver does not interfere with the beep you have
configured. You could play the entire William Tell Over-
ture, and then tell your machine to "beep", and you will
still get the "beep" the way it was previously con-
figured.
6.4 Testing Your Beep
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Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
As mentioned before, you can easily test your beep
any time you want to. Just enter, at the DOS prompt, the
command:
ECHO ^G
and your beep will play back, just the way you've
configured it.
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Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
7. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I think it is important for those of us in the com-
puting profession to get to know each other. Just as
"ShareWare" software can help to extend the reach of the
programs we write, hopefully this concept will help to
extend our interpersonal network of contacts as well. It
is not necessary that software authors be condemned to a
life of anonymity! I encourage other authors of
"ShareWare" products to further this personal and profes-
sional networking by telling us about themselves as well.
The Speaker Device Driver was written in 1986 by
Gordon E. Peterson II. I have been writing computer sys-
tem software in assembly language for about sixteen
years, starting as a Computer Science major at the
University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. This was my
first exposure to IBM equipment, learning on their 360/75
system (a BIG computer at the time, with a million bytes
of main memory and two megabytes more of slow Ampex bulk
core memory. It is astonishing to realize that I have
nearly that much memory, and much faster too, on the
machine on the table in front of me).
During a little over nine years after getting my
degree, I worked in Advanced Product Development at
Datapoint Corporation.
On the off chance that you might be familiar with
Datapoint, I was the developer of the "Dot-Series" disk
operating systems there, being responsible for DOS.A,
DOS.B, DOS.C, DOS.D, and DOS.E. I was the author of
their high-speed disk BACKUP and COPY programs, the
REFORMAT utility, and their DUMP utility, among others.
I wrote their Multi-Partition Virtual Machine facility,
called PS (for Partition Supervisor), and their high-
performance print unspooler (called UNSPOOL). My most
notable software product I created there was the DOS ARC
System, which was the world's first commercially success-
ful local area network. This product eventually sold
over a billion dollars' worth of hardware for Datapoint.
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Speaker Device Driver User's Guide
At various other stages of my career, I have worked
with quite a variety of machines and equipment, ranging
from several different kinds of mainframes to
microprocessor control software for a very sophisticated
discotheque lighting control system; an advanced credit
card telephone; a museum exhibit controller running four
stereo tape decks, thirty loudspeakers and a similar num-
ber of spotlights; to the development of least-cost-
routing software controlling telephone central office
switching equipment.
Besides computers, my other interests include video,
stereo equipment, (and in fact most kinds of home
electronics), massage, travel (especially interested in
ocean liners and trains), Citroens (a French automobile),
and meeting people.
If you find this Speaker Device Driver to be useful
for you, and you decide you would like to help support
this experiment in "ShareWare", your contributions toward
that end would be appreciated. Also, if you would just
like to write, that is certainly welcome too! Perhaps I
will reconnect with some old friends, and make some new
ones too, this way.
If you come up with any music or other command files
for the Speaker Device Driver that you would like to
share with others, I would appreciate your sending me a
copy of them, too. (On diskette, preferably!) I will
consider these for inclusion on subsequent revisions of
the distribution diskette.
You can write to me at:
Gordon E. Peterson II
Noah Systems
P.O. Box 40476
San Antonio, Texas 78229-0476
Since I am currently (late 1986) spending a lot of
time outside the United States, please allow time for
mail to be forwarded to me. I'm looking forward to hear-
ing from you!
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