moomin
3 hours ago
This massively understates what you could do with the basic 1-bit arrangement. People managed to get music playing during gameplay (I think Manic Miner was first) and even managed to play music with two channels and percussion (Robin of the Wood IIRC).
vasac
an hour ago
It was possible to connect the MIC or EAR connector (I don't remember exactly which one, as this was 40 years ago) to a cassette recorder and start recording, which caused the cassette recorder to amplify the Spectrum's sound.
And when I'm mentioning cassette recorder - I had a neighbour in my building who also had a Spectrum and whose window was some 12 meters away from my window and once we connected our computer with audio cables (MIC to EAR and vice versa) so one types some short program (or just REM message) and enters SAVE while the other one enters LOAD and gets the message. Our networking adventure started bad as it turned out that cable had large signal loss so it seemed that this brilliant idea failed but then we connected cassette recorders between computers that hugely amplified signal and thing actually worked.
Experiment ended when a party-line neighbor started complaining that his phone line was unusable for hours - we used phones as yelling through the window while trying to synchronize wasn't producing satisfactory results.
Fun times.
UncleSlacky
3 hours ago
Some games even used it for (attempted) speech synthesis:
https://spectrumgamesuk.com/index.php?game=Meteor-Storm
"...possibly the first game with speech synthesis, albeit sounding like an unintelligble gargle."
selcuka
an hour ago
I could never understand what it said when I played that game back in time, but today I learned that it was "Meteor Alert! Meteor Alert!"
Quicksilva later improved their speech engine. QS Chess, for example, clearly said "This is the Chess Player".