Pc sound cards?

The PC speaker is best characterized by its inability to play more than one tone at once, the waveform being generated by the Programmable Interval Timer. Because of this, it was often nicknamed a PC beeper or PC squeaker, especially when sound cards became widely available. In spite of its limited nature, the PC speaker was often used in very innovative ways to create the impression of polyphonic music or sound effects within computer games of its era, such as the LucasArts series of adventure games from the mid-1990s, using swift arpeggios. Several programs, including MP (Module Player, 1989), ScreamTracker, Fast Tracker, Impulse Tracker, and even a Microsoft Windows device driver, could play Pulse-code modulation (PCM) sound through the PC speaker using special techniques explained later in this article. Several games such as Space Hulk and Pinball Fantasies were noted for their elaborate sound effects; Space Hulk in particular even had full speech. However, because the method used to reproduce PCM was very sensitive to timing issues, these effects either caused noticeable sluggishness on slower PCs, or sometimes failed completely on faster PCs (that is, significantly faster than the program was originally developed for).