PC-9800 Boot Sounds For Modern Computers!

There have been many computers that played a little jingle to greet you upon booting. The NEC PC-9800 is a famous example, though almost all the Macintosh computers played either the soothing “booting” chord or sometimes the Sad Mac “error” chord. And of course, consoles have long played music on startup, with the original PlayStation boot music heralding a whole new era of video games. But modern machines don’t do anything, except maybe a single beep if you’re lucky. So why not pop in this M.2 card (JP) and bring some quirky flair to your PC?

While this particular card is aimed at the Japanese market and specifically evokes the PC-9800, we hope to see some hackers creating projects bringing other custom boot sounds to laptops and PCs around the rest of the world! A simple microcontroller, DAC, speaker and flash storage for the waveform would be all that’s required. It could even be capacitively coupled into the system’s sound output for some extra nerd points. You could pull the ultimate prank and have your friend’s laptop play the opening notes to “Never Gonna Give You Up” upon boot. Or you could have your favourite hacker movie quote play – “I can trace her physical location by looking at the binary!”. Brilliant!

In the meantime, if you want one of these cards, you’ll likely have to use a Japanese mail forwarding service as the cards are only available from Japanese retailer Kadenken — though for only ¥2880, or just under $20 USD, which is a great deal.

[via Techspot]

24 thoughts on “PC-9800 Boot Sounds For Modern Computers!

    1. This is one of the best comments ever on Hackaday. I find it utterly criminal that more EEs don’t use the NE555 and LM3909 in more designs. “Just use a PIC.” Idiots.

  1. Interesting form factor. I could see a USB version masquerading as a mouse or keyboard and giving a sound when enumerated by BIOS. Possibly using the USB header pins for internal placement.

    Also you forgot to link some m.2 and PCIe article series from HaD

  2. This always seemed like a missing opportunity for customization. Manufacturers fell all over themselves to have full-screen logos at boot, but a 3-second low-fi sound sample through the in-case speaker would have been an equally annoying way to remind consumers “It’s an Asrock!”

    I’ve seen two PCs with attempts at a nifty boot sound:
    * A DFI 486/100 laptop which was badged heavily as “Multimedia” which meant an onboard sound card but no CD-ROM, so they had to play a tune to justify paying the premium for sound, I guess.
    * Sergey Kiselev’s BIOS for 8088 machines which plays the Intel jingle at boot. I think it was mentioned as a diagnostic tool, since being able to get recognizable sound means some of the timers and peripherals are set up properly before you can even hope to write to the screen.

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