Apple IIe / IIgs Monitor Question

[Tempest]

Sadly, there is no other way to adjust the monitor other than with the knobs that are on it. My monitor also is off a bit like you describe

 

Hmm... Maybe that's just how they are?

 

Ok I was able to change the border color and it looks much better. However it's odd, the graphics for the IIe games look a bit 'off'. I think the colors are just more saturated or something on the IIgs monitor, is there a way to adjust this like on the IIe monitor?

 

Anyone else notice IIe graphics are off a bit on the IIgs? Another thing I noticed is that Infocom games play with a blue background and white text. Man that is annoying... I think I can change this in the control panel...

 

Tempest

[Tempest]

Looks like it's back to the IIe for me. I've found out that for some reason most of my cracked games don't work. I don't know if it's because of the way they were cracked or what, but they either crash or reboot the machine. Interestingly Moon Patrol (a legit copy) doesn't work at all, nor does Gremlins. Also, the Kings Quest series looks like shit because the IIgs monitor doesn't do double hi-res well (lots of bleed and pink/green artifacting around the letters).

 

Now on my IIe monitor I've noticed that I can see some grainyness to the picture. Almost like I can see the individual pixles, like a very fine gridlike pattern or a texture. It's very hard to describe, but it's almost liek things aren't solid colors anymore. I don't know if it was always like this and I never noticed before or if my monitor is dying some how. Am I going insane?

 

Oh and for the record, was the ground in Karateka always made up of alternating orange and blue lines or is my monitor REALLY going (is it supposed to be one solid color?)? I guess I never noticed it before...

 

Tempest

[Bryan]

All I can say is that Apple's video generation method for the II series is very crude to begin with. I used to notice all kinds of wierd effects in the picture. Why not use something with a nice clean color output, like an Atari 800.

 

-Bry

[else]

I just discovered that Apple released their own video card for the IIgs. In addition to what the name implies, the Video Overlay Card from Apple also increased the IIgs resolution from 640x200 to 640x400. Of course, there were and still are some serious issues with using it for this purpose:

 

1) Apple's toolbox firmware (Quickdraw II) doesn't support the new resolution.

2) Apple's toolbox firmware "handles" are in the same area of memory as the RAM used by the video card for the image.

 

Still, there were a couple of slide show programs that were released that would move te toolbox code somewhere else, load an image, wait a while, and the move the toolbox code back.

 

Too bad Steve Jobs was so fanatical about killing off the Apple II line. The IIgs had so much potential that was never exploited! Anyhow, pretty funny that as an Apple II fan I only now learned about this now...

 

-Derek

 

Note -- this is not an April Fools joke. There is plenty of information to back this up by doing a Google newsgroups search on "Video Overlay card" and "640x400".