Could not afford a Soundblaster so I used 8 resistors to solder together a crude 8-bit DAC (called Covox iirc) which plugged into parallel port and was amplified by a cassette deck, which was good enough for games
On an Apple II, the built-in speaker could only do two states. You had to PWM your way into sounds while drawing on the screen and trying to keep audio sample rate while reading the analog joystick that took longer to read the more up/right it was.
Perhaps surprisingly the early PC had exactly the same architecture: two-state speaker, RC-timer based joysticks. A few games and eventually lots of demosceners managed to get decent sound out of the PWM speaker. Although I remember when demos and games really would have preferred you spend several hundred £ on a Gravis Ultrasound.
I remember needing to wait for a VBLANK before writing to the 6845's VRAM. Oh... And the write-only EGA registers, that made it impossible to know in what mode you were...
What a revolting machine the PC was...
I remember the first time I got my sweaty little hands on a 286 with VGA graphics (before that I had an XT with CGA).
It was like stepping into the future.
Shortly after I got my hands on a 386 Elonex laptop with B&W VGA and it was amazing (I got it from a family friend who was binning it, the ribbon between the screen and the base had snapped and it was a 50p part for a machine that was selling well north of a 1000 at the time).
I owe my whole career to my stubborness and a broken ribbon cable to HDD on a 286. countless hours and library time to figure out to read HDD with only DOS debug program, and int13. Ooo man i wish i have the same patience and stubborness now
For me it was writing a program to balance my mums household accounts on a ZX Spectrum and figuring out how to load/save data to a tape.
Bless her she actually used it even though it was about as much work as doing it by hand.
I think she was just trying to keep an excited 9yo happy.
It ended up been rather more sophisticated than the original plan.
A colleague of mine remembers using the rotational speed of drum memory to accomplish a "wait" function in his code.
Oh yeah, i remember visiting a richer friend who had a soundblaster until my parents bought me a sound card...
My first sound card took me ages to properly configure addresses and interrupts. I played Doom with MIDI audio only for a long time. It was like going on a homicidal rampage with headphones and loud music.
Yes! Doom with midi sound...I remember it well. I remember unwrapping that SoundBlaster and feeling like a king. Man I miss those days.
Edit: this seems to have gone full "Four Yorkshiremen", possibly remembering the last time AMD was really competitive.