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.
A proven winner, with significant contributions to the field would be more accurate.
>Why should anyone care what he thinks about games?
It's not what he thinks about games in general, it's what he think about a particular historical artifact that happens to be a game. And people care about his opinion on those times (the website linked is quite popular) because he was an important contributor to that era of computing and the early PC industry.
>Macs suck for games and they always have.
Only for people whose appreciation for games is restricted to the latest, full-blast on the GPU, AAA titles.
>Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.
And it's HE who sounds like a "sore loser"? Oh, the irony.
I know it's bill gates, but Hertzfeld comes across as the kind of guy who enjoys making people feel small.
I think the original poster was simply responding to the "vibe" of that essay.
The one common complaint for all game developers seems to be about Apple's nightmare-inducing OpenGL implementation.
Not in the 80s. PCs were DOS machines for the office and if you wanted to play a game the Mac, Atari or Amiga were much nicer plattforms.
Ataris were never really that good for gaming either, but they were used a lot by pro audio folks. They had superior midi capabilities and programs.
C64's competition were the Atari 400, 800, XL and XE lines. Most games came out for both platforms. Atari's player missle system was both an advantage and a disadvantage in some respects.
The ST and Amiga were competitors but completely different platforms than their respective predecessors.
When you're talking Mac - the Apple II would have been the contemporary of the C64 and Atari 8-bit lines. There were games on Apple computers as well, but I suspect not as many. They were completely dysfunctional and the Apple IIgs was a really fun machine.
Hell of a game.
They built a machine to compete with the C64 at the time when Amiga was the new thing.
They were popular in Europe, where they were cheap. In fact, in the UK, the 512K Atari ST with mono screen and mouse was slightly cheaper upgrading a 128K Mac to 512K (£750 vs £800).
The Atari ST was slightly faster than the Mac, had a better monochrome screen, and could run all Mac software, albeit not legally. (You either bought a plug-n cartridge that took Mac ROMs or used MacBongo, a ripped-off version loaded from disk.)
Atari practically owned the gaming business with its home games consoles, and its first home computers -- the Atari 400 and 800, launched in 1979 -- were the best games machines around at the time.
The Atari ST was the one the audio folks used, and it did play games, just not as well as the Amiga.
Curiously enough, the Amiga was developed by staff from Atari, while the Atari ST was developed by staff from Commodore. (This was after Jack Tramiel left Commodore and bought Atari, which he ran with his sons.)
Honestly, I think that it's still impressive. There was a beauty to those old black-and-white bitmaps that modern engines just don't capture. Same with the icons from back in the day. We've gained an awful lot, but we've also lost something.
Programmers were utterly amazed by Doom. Nobody had thought that was possible on the PC hardware.
The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.
Huh?
Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NEXTSTEP operating system. The Doom game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's C/C++ compiler was used. (Wikipedia)
The tinkering part leading to the creation of Doom was done on NeXT.
True. I remember the feedback a WW2 vet pilot gave after testing PC FS. It went something like 'if flying on a PC got any more realistic, you'd need a pilot's license to do it.' !!
The Amiga sound and graphics chips blew other systems out of the water technically, and did good with the consumer offerings like the A500, but aside from a niche in the video editing market (Toaster on A1000/A2000), Macs and PCs swamped it in sales numbers.
I have had a lot of systems starting in 1978 with an all-in-one CPM PET with a cassette drive to load programs, a very small green text terminal, and 8K RAM. I paid $800 for it used, and another $850 for a 32K Ram upgrade the year after. You could 'pop the hood' like an old American muscle car, and check the board inside, and install the RAM card. I wrote a horse racing game in 1979 using just ASCII characters with random trots, and an odds and bettings system for my two horse-loving, OTB-visting parents.
I have only really lusted after three machines: A Lisp Machine, Silicon Graphics workstation, and the NeXT machine, again all technically brilliant, but not the biggest sellers. Pricey because of that.
The best tech doesn't always win by default, and that's not always a bad thing (as I once thought).
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...