In the days before sound cards had been invented the games produced sound using the PC beeper. Nowadays very annoying and horrible. Does anyone know if those very old gog-games like Might and Magic 1 or the early Ultimas etc. still use the beeper? Or has it been eliminated from the code?

The Dos based games on GOG use DOSBox, so while the games still use the beeper sounds, they are played through your computer's sound card, not the beeper itself. So, they do sound like beeper, they don't use your hardware beeper (if you still have one). Whether that makes them more or less annoying is your call, but you should be able to set the volume easier.

Some games like Might and Magic 1 & 2 and early Utlima games still use the beeper through DOSBox as there is no other way to output sound, but as JMich says, the sound is output through your sound card/speakers, so it's easy enough to turn it off or down.

Those games that have Soundblaster or Adlib support are configured to use the best option available.

Ah, yes, that should be a quite big advantage. Thanks for the information.

GOG can't eliminate anything from the code, they don't have access to it (and that's assuming the code even still exists). Besides, it would no longer be the game as it was meant to be, whether that's a good thing or a bad one is up to you ;)

With some exceptions here and there, like for some odd reason GOG has chosen to default to Adlib/SB music in Strike Commander, even though there is also General MIDI support available for it (Soundblaster still plays the digitized sounds and speech on the side, though).

(IMHO the best music option for Strike Commander is Roland MT-32 though, but then you need a real MT-32/CM-32, or use an emulator like Munt. For most General MIDI is probably good enough in Strike Commander, but the Adlib/Soundblaster music is just awful).

I think they had the same also for e.g. Little Big Adventure. For some other games, GOG has chosen the best option, like General MIDI + SB for Privateer.

Well, you could disable emulation of the beeper in the DOSBox configuration file but to be honest it's easier to just turn the volume on your computer down.

Well, I just tried good old Starflight. Yes, it's obviously beeper sound, but you can turn it down. And as soon as it's not as loud and invasive anymore it's even only half as annoying or less. ;-)

Beeper? Isn't that what we thought was all the rage before cell phones became small enough to carry and cheap enough to buy?

I am guessing you are talking about the PC Speaker that was part of old PC's before sound cards became the norm? (It, believe it or not, had more range than just beeping :p - I remember having a sort of 'mod' for Windows 3.1 that used the PC Speaker for windows sounds rather than a soundcard (which I didn't have at the time) - it was tinny but it worked)

Well, we in Europe (including Germany) referred to them collectively as "pagers", so...

I am sure pagers was the 'proper' term here in the states too, I just grew up hearing them referred to as beepers (might have been a locale thing)

Frankly whenever I watch an 80's or 90's movie/show where someone has one of these things in German it's called a "beeper". Also when my dad first got one of these things from his employer in the early 90's (in Germany, mind you) the people at the company referred to it as a "beeper". Frankly I think I only heard the word "pager" many years later in newer films and games that are set in the 80's or 90's. :P Not saying that "pager" is the wrong term, just saying that "beeper" was also pretty popular in Germany.

I honestly don't recall ever hearing "beeper" in German. I know "pager" and I know "pieper" (which essentially does translate as "beeper"), but "beeper" is new.

Yeah, I actually remember a few DOS games that actually played back more complex SFX through the speaker. I particularly remember the game Oxyd Extra. It supported Soundblaster but when setting the game to speaker it played the same sounds and music cues. Of course it sounded worse than Soundblaster audio but the SFX were perfectly recognizable. There's been a few games that demonstrated that with some effort put into the software PC speakers were capable of playing back all sorts of SFX, music and even speech. I think the reason why such advanced speaker sound wasn't very common is that the sound samples were too big and by the time developers had more memory at their disposal they could already achieve better results through soundcards, rendering that effort unnecessary.
Well, maybe the company where my dad worked was an exception. I mean, those people were programmers who speak fluent Denglisch... but for a while "beeper" was the term I heard most commonly for these things.

Ah, the good old times when you'd run a DOS game in the middle of the night, and then the whole neighborhood would hear the music: "BEE BOO BOO BEE BO BE BOO BOO BE BOO BO BE BOO,..." (that was the title tune from Leisure Suit Larry, by the way). And you reaching for the power button of the PC to turn the damn loud infernal machine off.

It was like some space age high-tech later when some sound cards offered an option to reconnect the beeper cable to your sound card, so that the sounds would come through your speakers instead (so that you could indeed apply also volume to them).