From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Mar 28 23:26:47 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from phoenix.welearn.com.au (phoenix.welearn.com.au [139.130.44.81]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DB82D37B41E for ; Thu, 28 Mar 2002 23:26:41 -0800 (PST) Received: (from sue@localhost) by phoenix.welearn.com.au (8.11.6/8.11.6) id g2T7Qcn15650 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Fri, 29 Mar 2002 18:26:38 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from sue) Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 18:26:38 +1100 From: Sue Blake To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: PC speaker tunes for everybody Message-ID: <20020329182638.D10242@welearn.com.au> Mail-Followup-To: Sue Blake , freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I'm looking for some general advice before I attempt to write a program to play PC speaker tunes from abc music notation http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/ (In case anyone notices a program called playabc which is advertised as doing this, no, it actually produces a .au file and sends it to the sound card, not the speaker.) For FreeBSD I could produce output in the format described in spkr(4) and send it to /dev/speaker, using perl which is already half fathomable to me. I'm not sure if there's another way to play the speaker more directly, but I suspect there is one that clever people know about and that would require C or worse. I'm looking at /usr/local/src/sys/i386/isa/spkr.c and wishing I understood what it's trying to tell me. Linux users report they have no speaker device, and I've never found a Linux user who plays speaker tunes. Other types of unix are even more of a mystery. So my question is, if I were to output strings to /dev/speaker, would it only work on FreeBSD? And if so, is there another approach I could take to make the program useful to more of the PC speaker tune fanatics who might want to use it on unix-like systems? If so it might be worth investing considerably more effort. Or is in in the nature of these wonderful antique musical instruments that any solution has to be OS-dependent? (An email cc would be appreciated, since IANAH.) -- Regards, -*Sue*- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message