3 ms·

Agree with the article, the code is not to be proud of. One thing about the Macintosh, it was better but the price was way higher. Most people stayed with the z

Agree with the article, the code is not to be proud of. One thing about the Macintosh, it was better but the price was way higher. Most people stayed with the z80s that costed a fraction and were as good for games.

spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
The IBM wasn't cheap when it came out - when comapared to a PET or Apple ][ I recall working on a Grey Import IBP Pc in the UK - Our electronics shop built an inverter to convert 240v to 110.
kabdib 10y ago
The Mac folks understood a lot more about personal computers than the IBM folks. For instance, the graphics hardware on the Mac wasn't much to write home about, but the PC's graphics was unbelievable garbage that had no hope of performing well (it probably set back GUI development on the PC by five years). The Mac's sound wasn't great, but the PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck. Decent sound on the PC finally became real and relatively well adopted in the early 1990s. On the PC there were a lot of fights about standard ways to do things that just worked on the Mac: Memory expansion (that was a whole industry right there), graphics, networking, mice. Even the CPU needed a turbo button to work correctly. Just about the only piece of the PC that universally worked and didn't beg for improvement was the keyboard. So you can argue that the "crappy PC" spawned a bunch of industries to fix things, while the Mac, which was a lot closer to perfection, only spawned small businesses to satisfy niche needs. Apple nearly died in the 1990s because the alternatives finally caught up to them, a decade later, and Apple couldn't satisfy the computing industry alone. Still can't, doesn't try. But I had a PC (256K, two floppies) and I had a Mac, and I sold the Mac because I couldn't develop software on it without going crazy (early Mac development was pretty painful; at one point I was seriously considering FORTH, and I hate FORTH).
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  The PC was much more used as a replacement for things previously done by minicomputers, at least in my field of vision. Just the differential in cost made for quite a business model.
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
  PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck While true, the quality of sound achievable this way is a matter of software. There are many programs that achieved excellent sound quality, playing music even with just a speaker and a TTL drive. Remember, the simplest DAC is PWM into a low-pass filter.
  - kragen 10y ago
    A couple of years back, I burned out a friend's tweeters by hooking up an Arduino's 31.25kHz PWM to his stereo system. Worked fine at first, but it eventually melted his tweeters. I figured the stereo would low-pass-filter the input for me, and I paid the price. The PC speaker didn't have PWM; it had a square-wave generator with adjustable frequency. Very few 1980s programs achieved anything even approaching decent sound quality using the PC speaker, although by the 90s, CPUs were fast enough that it was reasonably feasible. In the late 90s, I used to patch my Linux kernel with an unofficial driver that provided arbitrary PCM output via the PC speaker. It was glitchy if I left interrupts disabled during IDE disk accesses, which was the default at the time due to some buggy IDE devices that would sometimes corrupt data if you didn't. Fortunately, mine wasn't one of them. I feel like PDM is just as simple as PWM and often gives better quality, and an R-2R DAC like a Covox is arguably just as simple as PWM and gives dramatically better quality. You need a few more pins, though, or a 74595.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
      Interesting! I must be thinking of a different computer then. Perhaps my Radio Shack CoCo. I remember some small computer from the mid-late 80's producing really good music with just a logic output driving the speaker. Was sure it was the IBM/clone. One of the nice things is that I have original cloth-bound IBM PC 5150 Technical Manuals in my basement so I can actually go look up the schematics of what's driving the speaker :-)
  - kabdib 10y ago
    Well, maybe. It's still bang-bang control, and to get decent quality you'd have to dedicate the processor to bit-banging the port. With the Mac you just filled in a buffer that got DMA'd along with the video. Not great, but at least you could do waveforms using a slice of the CPU. The PC was built to beep, and that's about it. Anything you got out of it past that was painful and used a lot of CPU.
BashiBazouk 10y ago
But keep in mind that this was while the Mac was still in development. The Apple ][ was a great game machine. That is what they are probably comparing it to. I was in high school at this time and the library had a whole wall of PCs and one Apple ][. Huge crowd playing Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple, no one touching the PCs as they only had Flight Simulator on them. In a vacuum, Donkey is not too bad, but compared to Castle Wolfenstein and the other good games on the Apple, I can see why it got a meh...

spacecowboy_lon 10y ago

The IBM wasn't cheap when it came out - when comapared to a PET or Apple ][ I recall working on a Grey Import IBP Pc in the UK - Our electronics shop built an inverter to convert 240v to 110.

kabdib 10y ago

The Mac folks understood a lot more about personal computers than the IBM folks. For instance, the graphics hardware on the Mac wasn't much to write home about, but the PC's graphics was unbelievable garbage that had no hope of performing well (it probably set back GUI development on the PC by five years). The Mac's sound wasn't great, but the PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck. Decent sound on the PC finally became real and relatively well adopted in the early 1990s. On the PC there were a lot of fights about standard ways to do things that just worked on the Mac: Memory expansion (that was a whole industry right there), graphics, networking, mice. Even the CPU needed a turbo button to work correctly. Just about the only piece of the PC that universally worked and didn't beg for improvement was the keyboard. So you can argue that the "crappy PC" spawned a bunch of industries to fix things, while the Mac, which was a lot closer to perfection, only spawned small businesses to satisfy niche needs. Apple nearly died in the 1990s because the alternatives finally caught up to them, a decade later, and Apple couldn't satisfy the computing industry alone. Still can't, doesn't try. But I had a PC (256K, two floppies) and I had a Mac, and I sold the Mac because I couldn't develop software on it without going crazy (early Mac development was pretty painful; at one point I was seriously considering FORTH, and I hate FORTH).

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
The PC was much more used as a replacement for things previously done by minicomputers, at least in my field of vision. Just the differential in cost made for quite a business model.
HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck While true, the quality of sound achievable this way is a matter of software. There are many programs that achieved excellent sound quality, playing music even with just a speaker and a TTL drive. Remember, the simplest DAC is PWM into a low-pass filter.
- kragen 10y ago
  A couple of years back, I burned out a friend's tweeters by hooking up an Arduino's 31.25kHz PWM to his stereo system. Worked fine at first, but it eventually melted his tweeters. I figured the stereo would low-pass-filter the input for me, and I paid the price. The PC speaker didn't have PWM; it had a square-wave generator with adjustable frequency. Very few 1980s programs achieved anything even approaching decent sound quality using the PC speaker, although by the 90s, CPUs were fast enough that it was reasonably feasible. In the late 90s, I used to patch my Linux kernel with an unofficial driver that provided arbitrary PCM output via the PC speaker. It was glitchy if I left interrupts disabled during IDE disk accesses, which was the default at the time due to some buggy IDE devices that would sometimes corrupt data if you didn't. Fortunately, mine wasn't one of them. I feel like PDM is just as simple as PWM and often gives better quality, and an R-2R DAC like a Covox is arguably just as simple as PWM and gives dramatically better quality. You need a few more pins, though, or a 74595.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
    Interesting! I must be thinking of a different computer then. Perhaps my Radio Shack CoCo. I remember some small computer from the mid-late 80's producing really good music with just a logic output driving the speaker. Was sure it was the IBM/clone. One of the nice things is that I have original cloth-bound IBM PC 5150 Technical Manuals in my basement so I can actually go look up the schematics of what's driving the speaker :-)
- kabdib 10y ago
  Well, maybe. It's still bang-bang control, and to get decent quality you'd have to dedicate the processor to bit-banging the port. With the Mac you just filled in a buffer that got DMA'd along with the video. Not great, but at least you could do waveforms using a slice of the CPU. The PC was built to beep, and that's about it. Anything you got out of it past that was painful and used a lot of CPU.

BashiBazouk 10y ago

But keep in mind that this was while the Mac was still in development. The Apple ][ was a great game machine. That is what they are probably comparing it to. I was in high school at this time and the library had a whole wall of PCs and one Apple ][. Huge crowd playing Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple, no one touching the PCs as they only had Flight Simulator on them. In a vacuum, Donkey is not too bad, but compared to Castle Wolfenstein and the other good games on the Apple, I can see why it got a meh...