Tower Toppler

[ZylonBane]

The standard Apple II can display 6 colors in HIRES mode: black, white, green, orange, purple, and blue. Each line is 40 bytes, but the high bit of each byte tells the video circuit whether or not to delay the output of that byte by half a color-clock. So in any given byte you can have black/white/green/purple, or black/white/orange/blue.

 

The Apple II's entire video system is, from a programmer's perspective, a thoroughly revolting hack.

[Bryan]

The Apple II's entire video system is, from a programmer's perspective, a thoroughly revolting hack.

 

Thanks for that explanation. I knew it was something like that. I have to go vomit now.

 

-Bry

 

I can't wait for Apple II freaks to show up and tell us how that's obviously the best way to generate graphics.

 

Favorite Apple user quote:

 

"Apple megahertz are faster than regular megahertz"

 

Must be some special hot-rod version of the 6502, huh?

 

-Bry

[SmileyDude]

I can't wait for Apple II freaks to show up and tell us how that's obviously the best way to generate graphics.

 

Nice -- I will admit that I have used an Apple II once or twice... ok a lot. But, honestly, I don't know how someone could say that the graphics capabilities of the Apple II are better than the Atari or the C-64 (as much as I despise that machine, I have to give it credit where its due).

 

The Apple II's advantages were expandability and durability. There was very little you could do to those things that would harm then, and you certainly can't beat having direct access to the CPU bus for expandability. Once Apple started invading the schools, it's collection of educational software became another advantage.

 

Now, on a personal level, I like the Apple IIs, but I don't consider them in the same league as the Atari. They both have their uses -- for example, I don't think that the Atari is as good at tasks like word processing as the Apple II -- the 80 column cards for the Apple II along with those monochrome displays made the Apple II superior for that purpose. But, now that we all have PCs (or Macs) with really high resolution displays, we all use that for our word processing needs. This basically reduces the uses for an Apple II these days.

 

On the other hand, there is definetly something to be said about hooking up the old Atari 800XL to the TV, and playing some of the old classic games. Sure, you can use an emulator, but it's just not authentic. So, in that regard, the Atari still has some purpose these days.

 

So, even though I used both back in my younger days, and I enjoyed both, it's the Atari that still gets used, while the Apple IIs sit, gathering dust. Maybe it's because the Apple II is the logical parent to the PC, and we've all moved on to better PCs... while the Atari 8-bit lead to the Amiga which died a horrible death. There is no real equivalent to that style of hardware design these days, unless you count some of the consoles (the GBA comes close, IMO... but still not as flexible as the Atari gear).

 

It's sad, but powerful hardware lost out to commodity hardware, and we're all stuck with it today.

[Heaven/TQA]

there is the fact what i wanted to post yesterday regarding "why addicted to old computers"...

 

except PC (imho) all former hardware had special design, special tricks, special custom chips etc... and these are lacking in the "open pc world". this could be the reason for having NO relationship to our PCs but to our 8bit machines... and i just can see this transition happening with game consoles weather PS2, Xbox, GC or GBA... all have a kind of "personality"...

 

hve