Andy Hertzfeld recollects how Macintosh team dissected the new IBM PC and what they thought of donkey.bas:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
I'd call it an honest, judgmental article.
Edit: I'm talking about the author throwing salt, not any of the posters here.
Donkey was a 'hello world' of graphics with basic, it wasn't a game. Even as a kid, playing it never lasted more than a few seconds. Critiquing it as though it's a serious game gives this code too much credit and makes Hertzfeld look bad too- taking it seriously is almost as funny to me as the game is. For what it is, a code example, having a better game would have detracted significantly from it's value.
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).
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
I recall working on a Grey Import IBP Pc in the UK - Our electronics shop built an inverter to convert 240v to 110.