technoguy

The PC speaker is the most primitive sound system used in IBM compatible PCs, and in fact used to be the only one in use in PC games before more technologically advanced sound cards such as AdLib or the Sound Blaster were introduced as ISA plug-in cards in the late 1980s. However, even some years after these sound cards became mainstream and widely used, game manufacturers continued to support PC-speaker-only sound/music in their games in order to maximise their customer base. This was in part due to the fact that sound cards did not originally follow any commonly agreed-upon standard and were largely incompatible with each other, whereas the PC speaker was the only sound system that could be regarded as universally present.