That looks like a lot of very helpful information and good tools, thanks. In my small amount of spare time, it'll keep me busy for a good while. There don't seem to be any basic significant obstacles in this project.
Greetings.Have a look at Roman Black's BTc sound compression algorithm:
http://www.romanblack.com/BTc_alg.htm
and his BTc sound encoder:
http://www.romanblack.com/picsound.htm
The sound quality is not great, but unless you have lots of memory and a good bit of computing power, it'll be difficult to get any kind of decent sound quality.
The first computer game I bought that had sound (voices) and music was "Galaxy Invasion" by Big Five Software, released in 1980. It was impressive that it made sound, as the TRS-80 Model I didn't even have a speaker! They got it to make sounds by switching current to an internal relay on and off; the relay was there to control a cassette tape deck which programs and data were saved to and loaded from.
A bit about the game: http://www.trs-80.org/galaxy-invasion/
Speaking of using non-speaker devices for producing sounds/music, you will probably find this YouTube video highly entertaining:
And the Imperial March:
A seasonal medley:Well worth a listen.
This one is not to be missed!
by Duane Benson
by Aaron Carman
by Don Wilcher