• Dave@lemmy.nz
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    5 months ago

    I mean I guess you are supposed to take it to your computer repair shop and tell them it won’t stop playing Für Elise, and the shop is supposed to recognise it as a failure of CPU fan signal. If it just beeped a few times on startup then people would ignore it, and if it beeped constantly then well maybe Für Elise is nicer.

    • Kairos@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      Huh yeah that’s MUCH better than throwing a post code and playing a beep during startup to signal something is wrong.

        • Kairos@lemmy.today
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          5 months ago

          Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast “<Type> Error” during startup to be infinitely more helpful.

          • Dave@lemmy.nz
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            5 months ago

            I don’t think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that’s about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.

            • thejml@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              I had an Athlon motherboard with voice POST messages… one night I woke up to it saying “your CPU has a problem!” over and over and was freaked out until I was completely awake and figure out what was wrong.

              It wasn’t high quality coming through the piezo speaker, but it was good enough.

            • Asidonhopo@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              I definitely remember short 2 or 3 second clips of relatively high quality music being played through our family’s IBM XT’s motherboard speaker at one point using a demo we got from a BBS or the Public Domain Software site in the mid-80s. It wasn’t easy but some madman made a proof-of-concept that did it and it was incredible at the time.

              • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                That would be way more complex to have the motherboard play than a sequence of beeps at different frequencies. Especially at the time.

                • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  You could just about play speech using one bit output using pulse-width-modulation. But it was almost unrecognizable. And would take a lot of memory for the time.

                  It was usual to have different numbers of beeps for POST errors.

                  But this was an age when a PC would say “Keyboard error. Press any key to continue”, so things were not thought out that well.

                  • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
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                    5 months ago

                    If your keyboard was actually working, you pressed a key. If it was not working, you went to get new keyboard. What is “not thought through” about that?