• Kairos@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    Literally why would someone make that. That is completely indistinguishable as a signal.

    • 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.

                • 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.