Reverse Engineering Beep

[raleep]

I am doing it (by methods suggested by posts in the thread Beep without API), but it is tedious and I wonder whether anyone has done it before.
I want to do it because Beep doesn't work in Win 7.
Thanks, Robert

[MtheK]

  The WINAPI Beep (via INVOKE) works fine for me in Win7 in MASM,
tho not when under WTS SILENT. Also, Beep does NOT interfere w/shutdown.

[Farabi]

Hi,
Unfortunately you cant do it anymore, you will need to access the Hardware Port to do that directly, you will need a 3rd party dll to do that. I forget the dll name, its been long time ago, almost a decade.

[jj2007]

There is a lengthy (actually: awful) excuse by Mr Osterman: What's up with the Beep driver in Windows 7?

For Windows 7, we resolved the issue completely – we moved all the functionality that used to be contained in Beep.Sys into the user mode system sounds agent – now when you call the Beep() API instead of manipulating the 8254 chip the call is re-routed into a user mode agent which actually plays the sounds.

Now that is simply a lie: No sound under Win7-64, at least (see below) for short durations. What is even more surprising is that when you google Beep missing Windows 7 you get - nothing. As if nobody had ever used that API. Or as if there was a secret deal between M$ and Google  ;)

However, the official Beep doc has some interesting "community add-ons", inter alia:

just found that you need to use at least a value of 80 for the duration, otherwise nothing will be played. Sometimes the Beep service seems to hang, too, so nothing is played until the system is rebooted (no way to restart the service with sc).

So when and why was a lower boundary of 80 introduced for the beep command?

I have some "infuriated" customers who run my product which was fine until now,...

I made some tests, and for my machine
  invoke Beep, 1000, 20
is mute but
  invoke Beep, 1000, 21
works.

Mysteries of Windows.