potatohead

Try a whiteboard marker. What you do is color over the C and then clean with light solvants.

How the heck does one get an inexpensive //e mouse? Lol, been wanting one for a while now.

Yeah. One thing many of us have learned is these things come and go. I have some cards I simply store after having checked them out. One day I will want it, and there you go. In any case, yup. The 1Mhz is the challenge for sure. Personally, I am hoping more people adopt 2.x and 4.x Mhz for projects. Double high resolution makes a ton better sense at those clocks. Would be great to see the machines benefit from all that before too long. My current projects are targeting both. The 1Mhz will display as I can make possible, and the higher clock one can really push things as well as do display locked graphics. And on that note, I really love bitmap games and all the crazy artifacts, tearing, partial draw, slowdowns, speed up and the like. They have a flavor that is unique same as the other old machine attributes do. Above all, by all means HAVE FUN. I am glad you got an Apple. They offer a lot, and are distinctive in ways an Atari or C64 may not be.

I would look hard at a FastChip. You can ask for a 65816 in your order and it acts like a 658C02 in actual use with main system RAM, but has full functionality when accessing on board RAM, which can total a megabyte. Acceleration was done back in the day. A FastChip can deliver a shade over 16Mhz.

This is the way. Works a lot better than you think it might. That's how I got started with apple again once I got a new system and built up software. My original one was stolen along with some Atari stuff during a forced move quite a while back.

I just saw this! Interesting. In my own tests using Applesoft, I found the most dramatic speed increase happens when everything is running on the FastChip RAM Mine is a 65816 as well. 1024Mb version, I believe.

Cool! I am eager to get the FujiNet for Apple running. It is awesome on an 800XL. You could try a passive reflector. Use some foil to make a dish and place your FujiNET at the focal point of it.

I got a FastChip and really like it! If you ask nicely, he will put a 65816 in there, which ends up acting like a 65C802, but runs at up to 16Mhz! Being able to run the Platinum at 3 to 5Mhz is just great. Games, like Nox Archaic play fantastic, like running on the //C+ That card and my CFFA have been awesome upgrades. Lately, I have been enjoying my RGB card talked about here. It is near perfect! And it allows me to run my Apple on a nice PVM display. I do have the HDMI card, VidHD and will say it too is excellent! That one offers new graphics and text modes, will allow GS graphics on the Platinum and more. It works at a fixed 1080p HDMI display though. I did not mind that and used it with a monitor. If HDMI appeals to you, VidHD is a great card to get. I will put mine into my GS. Was kind of over kill on the Platinum. And besides, I like my 8 bit fun to include analog displays. Your Mileage May Vary! Got a Z80 card from Ian Kim. Liked it, but just did not end up using it, but it sure was fun to play Coleco games and Sega 1000 games! That card is not currently installed, but I did like it and almost want a second system that is not a GS to hold cards so I can use them! The only other things I want are some card I can use with a FujiNET and a Mockingboard.

Mine arrived in great condition! Spent this evening making a cable to go from the 9 pin connector the card brings out to the //e back panel and to the RGB inputs on my PVM, and it worked first time! I have yet to use this great CRT display with anything other than composite and S-Video. It does both of those well, but there is something about how this era looks and feels when running an RGB signal. I have a FastChip [65816 version] in slot 3, Super Serial in 5, CFFA 3000 in 7. Seems to work great! Thank you! This little card is awesome!

As far as creating graphics go, I find it best to create on the machine, or do final edits on one. People using RGB devices, or HDMI get the "pure" colors, and that has a look very different from the artifact colors composite video users will see. To me, the composite is where it is at on the Apple. Artifact colors have a lot of subtle dynamics. It can look more detailed and having more colors than it actually does. And this is true for many systems, with the Apple being a great case! What makes it distinctive is the high color shift bit. Of course that means 7 pixels per byte, not 8! Bummer. But it also means having a 6 color high resolution graphics screen, and it turns out that mattered a lot more than I think many expected. Most computers had 2, 4, maybe 8 and definitely 16 colors, with 2 and 4 being most common. And that just is not quite enough to differentiate everything in a compelling way. 6 colors is enough. And I have also found it makes a lot of sense to think about high resolution graphics as 16 bit values. All the color artifacts and subtle effects repeat every 2 bytes or 14 pixels. That makes things way easier to think about. And, unlike say the Spectrum, C64 and others having coarse color attributes, the Apple has them every byte! So, while there is color clash due to overlapping attributes, on the Apple this was far less of a problem due to the higher attribute density.

A lot of the early game art was done right on the computer. Was the usual graph paper and typing her values into memory, BSAVE, etc... If you want some early Apple 2 dev stories, John Romero produces new episodes of his "Time Warp" podcast from time to time. NASIR, for example, made quick draw to help with graphics.

I have been using a FujiNet with my 800XL and the thing is awesome! Been watching the Apple efforts with Interest. What "FujiApple" did you get and how is it working out for you?

The //c+ is solid for DHGR. 4Mhz is more than enough to deliver a great experience. Wish I had one because it is compact. I have to agree for the other machines, including a stock GS. 1 mhz is just not quite enough. A FastChip or other acceleration device works just fine to solve that problem on older machines.

Where are the files for building your own? I do want to buy a //e board from you, and want to check out the design, maybe make another one just to learn stuff.

Cool! Thank you.

Yeah, let's hope you get a reply. It is worth the money in my view.

I got a VidHD a few months ago. Sent an email to the address on Call APPLE. Paid via PayPal and one showed up some time later. I really like the card. It's full feature set is not available when using a FastChip on a //e Basically, that meant not getting spiffy cover art in Total Replay. No big. I had forgotten that card works with a GS. Might have to drop it in mine for a while. I also do not always use the FastChip. Most games and other programming related things I do are fine at 1Mhz. Nox Archaist is fun. I need to finish it. I really love that game.

Just saw this thread and wonder whether people have run NTSC machines at 50Hz. The Color Computer 3 has literally a 50 / 60 Hz switch in a register. When set to 50, the machine outputs a NTSC signal with the longer refresh time. My TV sets all displayed it, though one performed poorly. Has anyone changed the divisor to get essentially 50Hz NTSC on the C64? If so, that should yield the extra cycles and could yield more scan lines.

Yup. PC joystick for sure. The resistor values will be wrong. PC = 150k pot, Apple uses 100k pot.

I am roughly the same. Got an Atari at home and used the crap out of it. Eventually got an Apple and did all my serious computing on it. Mostly office type stuff, communications and some I/O, testing which I also did on the Atari via joystick ports. For a long time, I got into Atari and the VCS. Had a lot of fun, and then it all got stolen while moving. First machine I bought back was a nice //e platinum from Apple Rescue of Denver. The sort of flipped a switch due to how great the CFFA 3000 card was! So, I went ahead and began to really set the //e up! The FastChip card runs up to 16Mhz and mine has a 65816 on it, mostly because I always wanted to write some ASM and explore whether it had any advantages over the 65C02 for dealing with the crazy screen layout. ( mostly nope, but I haven't gone that deep yet too) Then the FujiNet came out and I had scored an 800 XL to replace mine... The FujiNet device is great like the CFFA 3000 is, and made for an awesome experience! And that's my next Apple card, along with the video card being discussed here.

Nice! Does that mean you might be in a place to produce //e boards? ( hoping, but happy to wait )

And the way to make the most of the characters is to work with them in pairs! Instead of 7x8, use 14x8. That way, all the artifact colors line up which keeps the number of characters needed to do the intended screen lower. Or, put another way, the intended screen can feature more elements per set of characters. Either means less on the fly redefinition too. Of course, none of it matters for programs intended for monochrome displays. This would be a spiffy add on.

You just gave me an interesting idea... That hardware could be made today. Basically, have a card plug into a slot and a cable that plugs into the video ROM socket. The card can handle updating the "ROM" and now there can be fast HGR and DHGR graphics! Useful from plain old Applesoft. For an idea what that would be like, people could run faster CPUs and a character blitter. Would not be quite the same, but darn close! My FastChip is crazy when Applesoft is loaded into 16 Mhz fast RAM. I have been working with the DELORES library that way and it works great! Personally, I think more of us should be running faster CPUs. Doing that really improves the machine. But, I get it. Some of us want to run at 1Mhz and push it that way. The character card, let's call it, would make both camps happy. And it would bring more of the world of character games, VIC-20 style, to the Apple! The Apple is already a great bitmap gaming machine. Even at 1Mhz, games like drol are strangely compelling! 6 colors is enough to do anything!

I got lucky and scored a PVM, low hour, displays anything world wide. It has been fun viewing PAL gear, for example. If you ever see a deal on one, you won't regret it.

Nice! I want a 128. Enjoy!