Re:AMD Ryzen AMA
by rbanffy on Friday April 14, 2017 @11:40AM
(#14115077)
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.
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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...