EricBall's Tech Projects

It was a combination of things.

 

- The Apple II was introduced in 1977, three years before the CoCo. When it came out alongside the PET and TRS-80, the Apple II was the only one with any graphics or sound, and the graphics were very impressive. Programmers learned how to exploit the system's capabilities, giving it a big headstart on machines that didn't come until later, like the C64 and Atari 8-bit systems.

 

- The Apple II's documentation was exceptional, and what the official docs didn't cover, the company was content to let third parties expose even more. This was a programmer's dream.

 

- Disk drive, as you mentioned; the Apple II was one of the first systems with a relatively low-cost drive. Diskettes made possible larger, more sophisticated games than what you could fit onto cassettes, and of course they delivered better performance and convenience than any tape drive.

 

IMO, the Apple II and CoCo aren't really comparable - they're different classes of computers. The CoCo was a "home computer" whereas the Apple II was much more general purpose: it was all over the place in small businesses, laboratories (scientists loved its expansion slots), and of course schools. The development community for the Apple II was enormous and gaming was one of the first pieces of that (due to the graphics advantage). This resulted in the Apple II having a gigantic software library compared to systems that actually sold more units such as the C64 and TRS-80. Many computer games of the early '80s were written first on the Apple II and then ported to other systems.

Copy protection was pretty broken on the Apple II as well. If people weren't using hardware they were using advanced copying software. The only effect copy protection had was to encourage the pirate scene and hackers.

Copy protection was pretty broken on the Apple II as well. If people weren't using hardware they were using advanced copying software. The only effect copy protection had was to encourage the pirate scene and hackers.

Yes, a lot of the copy protection was broken. But at least the A2 had disk based copy protection - it simply wasn't an option on the CoCo.

 

I did forget to consider the CoCo had cartridges - although I don't think there were any gamecarts released by 3rd parties; everything was sold by Radio Shack. (There were some third party expansion cartridges, I had a sound cart.) However, cart address space was limited to 8K.

 

But Streck is probably right - the few years of lead time gave developers the ability to develop the software techniques to code around the A2's limited graphics and sound capabilities. When the CoCo arrived, it was competing against the superior C-64.