How to play a tone with older Arduino

(work in progress)

According to Tom Igoe’s tone tutorial, “This [the tone function] will work only for Arduino 0018 and beyond.”. But I think that refers to the software, not the hardware.

It has been observed that the toneMelody example works with Arduino Duemilanove, but not the Arduino NG with ATmega8.

Why?

Let’s take a look at the tone function. It is located in

arduino-0018/hardware/arduino/cores/arduino/Tone.cpp