Apple IIe

[Anonymous No.6883191]

Hello, a friend is offering me an Apple IIe for 75 bucks. Includes cords, two floppy drives, and whatever extra cards are inside the computer, and all of it works. Should I buy it, or nah? And if so, what are some good games for it, besides Oregon Trail?

[Anonymous No.6883237]

>>6883191
Ultima was apparently designed with the apple 2 in mind for the first half of the series.

[Anonymous No.6883258]

>>6883237
Oh, yeah. I’ve never actually played Ultima before. I guess this could be a good opportunity.

[Anonymous No.6883270]

>>6883258
I'd say start with 3 or 4. 3 might be better since it's the end of the first trilogy. 4 will make you want to play 5 and 5 will make you want to play 6. and 6 isn't on the Apple 2.

[Anonymous No.6883275]

>>6883191
Prince of Persia

[Anonymous No.6883282]

It's nice if you like a lot of bleepy, clicky sounds and green and purple graphics. Although there's some cool games, many of the best ones were also available on the Atari 8-bit, C64, or PC and are better on those machines. I wouldn't refuse it myself, but it's a bit of an acquired taste.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUHT773gnPU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feH_bz-PwRA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72k1ZYp83tc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKqk9kosCs4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9iSMmA5ynk

Though it's probably the best platform for Broderbund, Origin, and Datasoft games as they developed primarily around the Apple II and the C64 and whatnot versions were usually just ports and often lacking something.

[Anonymous No.6883312]

Especially Lode Runner. The Apple version was the original and other versions have reduced screen width, one button joysticks which make it harder to control, or other fuckery.

[Anonymous No.6883324]

>>6883191
Oh, OP here. I should state that I have little to no experience in vintage computers, and I was thinking of using this as an introduction to them.

[Anonymous No.6883334]

>>6883324
Eh, a C64 would be a better intro home computer in my opinion.

[Anonymous No.6883735]

bump

[Anonymous No.6884128]

Wizardry
you can tell it's good because it keeps getting threads on /vr/

[Anonymous No.6884274]

Oh, also. Op here again. Would it be worth getting a floppy drive emulator, the original disks, or simply pirated copies of the originals?

[Anonymous No.6884490]

id get this for wizardry and ultima alone. maybe check out the homebrew scene.

[Anonymous No.6884515]

>>6883191
Tell him to sell it for 500 bucks on ebay. Then buy something actually interesting for the money

[Anonymous No.6884550]

>>6883191
>75 bucks to play the Apple II Oregon trail port

[Anonymous No.6884667]

>>6883191
>i'm watching a youtube channel and larping about each system it covers

[Anonymous No.6884724]

https://archive.org/details/TotalReplay

I recommend you play with this for a while, it's a nice and decently accurate emulator and front end the internet archive made specifically for Apple II arcade games. There's some great stuff in there like zaxxon, lode runner, robotron and defender that hold up as pretty good ports.

[Anonymous No.6884859]

>>6884724
>emulator
Op here, kys. I came here asking about hardware, not for you to shill a shitty emulator.

[Anonymous No.6884865]

>>6884667
>larping
Here’s a photo of the damn thing I took while at his place a month or two ago

[Anonymous No.6884885]

>>6883191
i'll take it if you don't want it

[Anonymous No.6884892]

>>6884885
No.

[Anonymous No.6884935]

>>6884859
You'll be back to emulation. It's fun to romanticize and there is some charm to seeing it run on the old clunky shit and a CRT... but as soon as you find that hardware's far more unstable, especially now that it's good and aged and rotted, and realize how much of a pain it is to get data on to old machines... you'll be back.

t. recent retro PC builder fucking god DOSbox and PCem are just so much better

[Anonymous No.6884952]

>>6884935
But why bother? If he’s getting into the hardware for the fun of it he’ll probably be burnt out on the handful of crappy games it has right around the time hardware headaches set in. I see no point in Apple II emulation other than just as a curiosity.

[Anonymous No.6885056]

>>6884865
unless you have some bigger plans than toy around with oregon trail and ultima on a beat up grimey time bomb, i'd pass

>>6884952
all the more reason to cut the LARP and just play the games you wanna play instead of wasting time and money

[Anonymous No.6885118]

>>6885056
>>6884935
>he thinks I wouldn’t clean it and properly maintain it
Begone, emutranny

[Anonymous No.6885124]

>>6885118
the way you post its so clear that youre up on this pedestal or this impression that people will be impressed by your apple IIe acquisition.

new flash buddy, the 8 bit guy doesn't care about you and old pc's are straight up obsolete garbage. just play games, no one will be impressed by your garbage i promise you that.
do what makes you happy i guess, but dont waste time/money going for some niche "aesthetic" that some e celeb painted for you.

[Anonymous No.6885143]

>>6885124
Oh shit, the 8 bit guy? I didn’t even know he still made videos. Look bud, your obsession with e-celebs and how emulation is superior wont make you look cool on the internet. I came here to discuss the apple 2e, not to get shilled shitty emulators by schizoids.

[Anonymous No.6885154]

>>6885118
I don't. That you're even asking such entry level questions about it gives me little confidence in the reality of it holding your attention for more than a week.

[Anonymous No.6885174]

>>6885154
I never expected to hold attention for it for long. I was thinking of buying it, fucking with it for maybe a year, and then selling it to a hipster on eBay for big bucks. I want to talk about what I’ll do with it when I actually have it at the time, and somehow that bothers you? How did the concept of e-celebs in this conversation get brought up in your schizoid mind anyway?

[Anonymous No.6885192]

>>6885154
this lol

>>6885143
i'm not trying to shill emulation, but it definitely has its place if all youre going to do is toy around with the thing aimlessly. i bet you're gonna have to look up how to boot into software.
why not at least collect nintendo or sega games like a normal person. what does the apple IIe mean to you personally? other than you watching youtube man solder things on it and get it working again. you're just clearly trying to build this identity-less aesthetic that will end up biting you when you realize you've surrounded yourself with things that you dont connect with.

[Anonymous No.6885204]

>>6885192
>collect
I already stated in an earlier post the end goal was to make a profit, and get some knowledge out of it along the way, so why even suggest that?

[Anonymous No.6885774]

>go to bed
>come back some hours later and open the thread
>it's turned into some hardware vs emulation cancer argument
Jesus Christ, what the hell happened?

[Anonymous No.6885808]

>>6884952
>>6884935
Apple IIs are pretty reliable overall, the only major problem you might have is bad RAM if it has those shitty MT4624 chips in it (Apple used a lot of those because they were cheap).

[Anonymous No.6885824]

>>6884952
>>6884935
Apple IIs are pretty reliable overall, the only major problem you might have is bad RAM if it has those shitty MT4264 chips in it (Apple used a lot of those because they were cheap).

[Anonymous No.6885830]

>>6884935
>and realize how much of a pain it is to get data on to old machines
It's not. You just get a Flash floppy emulator.

[Anonymous No.6885848]

>>6883258
of course U4 and U5 need a Mockingboard for music. also avoid Apple II ports of Sierra AGI games, they suck harder than a very large vacuum.

>>6884490
There's no homebrew scene on it.

[Anonymous No.6885863]

>>6884865
Does it power on and run?

[Anonymous No.6885868]

>>6885830
Oh, goodie. Let me ask, does it let you select from multiple floppies or do you have to use one at a time and prepare each game?

[Anonymous No.6885876]

>>6885868
He probably means Apple II CFFA. I assume it has a menu and you select what disk is currently active.

[Anonymous No.6885910]

>>6884952
Apple II emulation is really pretty meh, it's nowhere near as good or accurate as C64 emulation. And that's even with it being a far simpler machine.

[Anonymous No.6885928]

One issue with Apple II collecting is that there's no good online community like there is for Commodore machines and no homebrew or whatever scene or any good collection of hardware or programming info.

[Anonymous No.6885945]

>>6883191
>75 bucks
yes i would do it

[Anonymous No.6886084]

From the standpoint of coding games, the Apple II is a lot like the ZX Spectrum in that you have a 1-voice bleeper and have to use soft sprites by XORing bitmaps around...but with a much clunkier and more illogical graphics setup.

[Anonymous No.6886321]

>>6884490
I don't mind the C64 Wizardrys but they're really ports of the JPC versions, not the Apple II originals. Also the Apple Wizardrys require you to type out the full name of spells which is annoying.

[Anonymous No.6886330]

>>6885863
Yes. I’ve seen it myself, but didn’t take a video.

[Anonymous No.6886506]

There's a lot of educational games, in fact maybe as much as half of all commercially released Apple II games ever were educational. Some of these are exclusives not found on other machines and many are quite obscure and perhaps not even dumped.

[Anonymous No.6886881]

Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk with you again

[Anonymous No.6886903]

>>6886881
kys, fucktard

[Anonymous No.6886918]

>>6883191
My favorite game to play at school was Chem Lab. I also remember another one with helicopters dropping bombs.

[Anonymous No.6886964]

LITERALLY only has two good games. Wolfenstein, and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein.

[Anonymous No.6887043]

And Lode Runner and Prince of Persia and Wizardry and Ultima.

[Anonymous No.6887330]

/vr/ is kinda bad at discussing anything that's not AAA Japanese console games.

[Anonymous No.6887464]

You should buy it just to spite the anon ITT who has a raging hateboner for the Apple IIe for some reason.

[Anonymous No.6887467]

>>6887330
Not really, niche japanese games also get good discussion sometimes.
Nobody cares about old computer western games outside of nostalgic brits.

[Anonymous No.6887473]

>>6887467
>Apple II games
>Britain
Pick uno.

[Anonymous No.6887476]

>>6887473
Brits are the only ones obsessed enough to pick up a fight against Apple II, he's not wrong.

[Anonymous No.6888025]

>>6883191
>>6883324
If you got the space, not short on cash, and it all works good, sounds like a great deal.

>>6884865
>busted keys, being used as a shelf in his garage
ow. I suppose you could find a replacement keyboard.

>>6885848
I mostly played Ultima on a //e, I found the music on my friend's Commodore a little distracting.

[Anonymous No.6888034]

A lot of its RPG and strategy titles also exist on the C64 and generally look and sound nicer, although the super-fast disk access on the Apple is appreciated with those games.

[Anonymous No.6888048]

>>6888025
>I mostly played Ultima on a //e, I found the music on my friend's Commodore a little distracting.
I'm the opposite, I'm so used to the SID chip that any other version sounds odd.

[Anonymous No.6888052]

For some games, the Apple's 2-button analog joysticks are better than the Atari-style sticks. For example Defender is a lot easier to control on the Apple than the C64 or other systems with a one button digital joystick. Like in Lode Runner, you press button 1 to drill right and button 2 to drill left while on the C64 you'd have to move to face in the direction you want to drill in.

[Anonymous No.6888364]

>>6888052
Hmm, did other companies make 2-button style joysticks as well? The original apple ones are rather expensive online.

[Anonymous No.6888373]

>>6884550
I bet Sheldon Cooper and Adam F. Goldberg's dads paid a lot more back in the day.

[Anonymous No.6888376]

>>6888025
I’m thinking I could probably just get the key pins and caps 3d printed, as just sounds too expensive to buy an entire keyboard for four spare parts.

[Anonymous No.6888385]

>>6888364
Lots of companies made joysticks. Kraft (pic) was kind of a standard one that most people had, and had a tighter feel than Apple's own sticks.

When shopping for a joystick, make sure it has either a DB9 plug, or a 16 pin connector. The DB9 plugs into an external port on the //e & //c. The 16 pin connects to a socket on the motherboard on the //e and earlier.

I'm looking at eBay right now and the first one that came up says for Apple, but the photo clearly shows a DB15 plug that PCs used

[Anonymous No.6889118]

>>6888048
Damn, I forgot the apple ii barely even had a soundchip

[Anonymous No.6889548]

>>6888385
Wait, you have to physically put the 16 pin connector inside the computer? That explains why it looks so odd

[Anonymous No.6889667]

>>6888385
There were also dual mode PC/Apple II sticks with a switch to select (the difference is because the Apple sticks had different potentiometer values than the PC ones).

[Anonymous No.6889973]

>>6889667
Wait, there’s a difference between pc and apple computers? I thought they were PCs as well?

[Anonymous No.6890919]

>>6889118
The prior to the //e, the machine leaned more towards hobbyist, so the idea of plugging it directly to the motherboard probably wasn’t so strange.
Also the internal port is a “game i/o” which supported 4 paddle inputs, 3 game buttons, among other features … people would connect multiple Apples and use it as the communication interface.

[Anonymous No.6890932]

I've played the CGA PC port of Defender before and I assume the Apple II one is very similar.

>button one to fire
>button two to fire a hyper bomb
>accelerate depending on how far you push the joystick left or right
>press H to go to hyperspace

I booted the C64 port on VICE and couldn't figure out how to do anything but shoot. The PC/Apple sticks make controlling the game infinitely better.

[Anonymous No.6891057]

>>6890932
>tfw zoomie pounded wasd for a few second and gave up never thinking to try the arrow keys

[Anonymous No.6891065]

>>6890932
Distance pushed probably didn’t affect thrust at all. Original game it was handled by a button, so it was an on/off affair.
Additional button definitely helped with games, as someone earlier noted in particular with Lode Runner. Drawback though was analog sticks aren’t really conducive for twitchy action games of the era.

[Anonymous No.6891070]

>>6889973

God damnit you need to be 18 to post here

[Anonymous No.6891083]

>>6891057
>>6890932
C64 uses F7 for Hyperspace and space bar for a hyper bomb.

[Anonymous No.6891104]

>>6891057
Always wondered About the logic behind those arrow keys.

[Anonymous No.6891123]

>>6891065
>Distance pushed probably didn’t affect thrust at all

On the PC port it did. Trust me, I've played it before. Push the joystick more than 50% right or left to accelerate (dunno how it works with the keyboard controls, I'd always play with a joystick).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSvaeO_OSfc

Also I watched this and remembered now. It was press both buttons for a hyper bomb, not H.

[Anonymous No.6891127]

>>6891123
>Also I watched this and remembered now. It was press both buttons for a hyper bomb, not H.
*Hyperspace I mean

[Anonymous No.6891138]

>>6891104
Arrow keys go up or right IIRC. Holding Shift with them is for left or down. Yeah it's kinda clumsy, but then the Apple II didn't even have cursor keys at all.

[Anonymous No.6891159]

>>6891065
>Additional button definitely helped with games, as someone earlier noted in particular with Lode Runner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5KogMbB1xQ

Lode Runner on the PC worked like an absolute charm with the joystick. Keyboard control is clumsy.

[Anonymous No.6891178]

>the virgin arrow keys
>the Chad joykey

[Anonymous No.6891187]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUyhiUKcSH8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUyhiUKcSH8

(Apple version at 2:29)

Shamus works quite well too with the joystick especially diagonal shooting and moving. I hate the Apple version of this game because they changed Shamus's sprite to some fag in a trenchcoat when the original sprite from the Atari 8-bit was perfect and didn't need to be messed with.

[Anonymous No.6891192]

>>6891138
I know how they worked. I just thought it was weird that left/right wasn’t the defaults (and up/down achieved through shift.) Computers back then were largely linear in operation, so you’d think they’d give more ready access to left/right.

The Apple II and II+ did have left & right arrow keys. For up&down, many games either used A/Z, or Return/slash (Ultima used the latter.)

[Anonymous No.6891197]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUyhiUKcSH8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gk_vLW-fSg

(Apple version at 2:29)

Shamus works quite well too with the joystick especially diagonal shooting and moving. I hate the Apple version of this game because they changed Shamus's sprite to some fag in a trenchcoat when the original sprite from the Atari 8-bit was perfect and didn't need to be messed with.

[Anonymous No.6891210]

>>6891192
I think both the Apple and Commodore keyboard layouts were derived from some popular terminal at the time that used arrow keys like that.

[Anonymous No.6891246]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computers-struggle-match-input-latency-apple-iie

It's actually true. See this TRS-80 video and notice how incredibly fast and absent of any input lag everything is. Press a key and it responds instantly. The video rendering is also near-instantanous. All this on a 2Mhz CPU and because it's not going through layers upon layers of driver stacks. Pressing a key is literally like activating a switch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ai9jtJHYow

[Anonymous No.6891538]

except for one retard early in the thread, this is the least hostile computer thread on /vr/ at the moment

[Anonymous No.6891547]

>>6891538
Euros don't care about the Apple II so we're spared their retardation.

[Anonymous No.6891817]

I've always had a hard time getting into Apple II games. they're like the ZX Spectrum but worse.

[Anonymous No.6891962]

>>6884865
>missing keys
hard pass

anyone remember an apple game, it was like carmen san diego but your character was male and rode on the subway?

[Anonymous No.6891965]

>>6891962
Agent USA

[Anonymous No.6892003]

>>6891104
>c64 kb
>logic
lol

[Anonymous No.6892004]

>>6892003
This haha was nothing but silly bs!

[Anonymous No.6892245]

>>6891962
>he wouldn’t just buy it anyway
Cringe

[Anonymous No.6892915]

bump

[Anonymous No.6893261]

>>6892004
hold my beer

[Anonymous No.6893276]

>>6883191
Aww yeah, gonna play some mother fucking number munchers!

[Anonymous No.6893836]

ok

[Anonymous No.6893840]

>>6883237
This, the Apple II versions of Ultima 1-5 are canon

[Anonymous No.6894467]

you don't need to play anything before U4 though

[Anonymous No.6894602]

Op here, he sent me some pictures of the internals.

[Anonymous No.6894608]

>>6894602

[Anonymous No.6894616]

Man a few e-celeb youtubers make videos about a re-release of an obsolete computer and this is the shit we get for weeks on end.

[Anonymous No.6894617]

The PCB appears in good condition, it's clean and everything. Should be fine if you can solve the missing keycap issue.

[Anonymous No.6894682]

>>6883191
If you know how to solder, make sure to recap that power supply or you'll eventually end up with a big smoky mess. Especially that rectangular X2 cap.

Either that or replace the guts with a modern supply:
https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/universal-psu-kit/

The guts look good, like >>6894617 said. Looks to be an Enhanced IIe with the 64k RAM (80 column) card and the 65c02 CPU upgrade.

[Anonymous No.6894702]

>>6894682
About 90% of IIes had the DHGR card. It would be really rare to find one that doesn't have it.

[Anonymous No.6894716]

>>6894602
I can see it has Oki RAM chips. That's good, 'cause if they were MT4264s it would be time to evacuate your bowels.

[Anonymous No.6894762]

>>6894682
>>6894702
>>6894716
By the way, what would be some good cards to add to it once I buy it? I know the mockingboard, or one of the clones, would be a good choice.

[Anonymous No.6894768]

>>6894762
The basic cards every machine had (DHGR, serial port, etc) are fine for most uses. More exotic stuff like 3.5" floppy and RGB cards are expensive and of relatively limited use.

[Anonymous No.6894773]

>>6894768
Oh, yeah, speaking of rgb. I know the apple iie only natively output composite. Would it be worthwhile trying to get a better video type out of it, or is composite basically the best I’ll get?

[Anonymous No.6894781]

The 65C02 used in the enhanced //e is little supported by anything but some late versions of AppleWorks. Occasionally it may break some II/II+ era games if they use undocumented 6502 opcodes which are removed from the 65C02, but it's rarely a concern.

[Anonymous No.6894795]

>>6894773
The RGB card was mostly a novelty/attempt to give it some of the IIgs's capabilities but it's not really needed. The standard green monochrome composite monitors were fine for displaying 80 column text and arguably sharper than a RGB monitor. There was also a mouse card but I'm not aware of any games that can use a mouse, it's mostly late period application software.

[Anonymous No.6894804]

>>6894795
Ah, I see. Ill just be using a crappy mid 2000s 13 inch crt as the monitor. Hopefully it’ll be fine.

[Anonymous No.6894813]

>>6894804
A color TV is going to suck for using 80 column text though it's fine for playing games (unless they're text adventures).

[Anonymous No.6895309]

>>6894617
>solve the missing keycap issue
Probably not possible. There were only a handful //e's made and only one keyboard shared between them. So there's no chance of finding spare parts. And reproducing a small simple plastic part simply isn't possible with today's technology

>>6894716
>that kid who heard something once and is compelled to let every one know at every possible opportunity

[Anonymous No.6895338]

Never mind the assembly language LARPer guy. A lot of computers from the mid-80s had those shitty Micron RAM chips; they were Micron's brand of 64kx1 DRAM and they died if you sneezed on them. To be fair it wasn't entirely their fault since Micron was a young upstart semiconductor company and hadn't really gotten their shit together yet. I was a bit worried for the OP but turns out he doesn't have those in his machine.

[Anonymous No.6895694]

>>6894602
Extended 80-column card (128k machine)
Unidisk controller (does the machine come with 2 drives?
>>6894608
"Enhanced" machine. Gives you some extra features, but not a whole lot that you'd really notice if your plan is to just casually play games.

[Anonymous No.6895712]

The enhanced IIe has a 65C02, that's the only difference and it's of no use for games. Basically it has a couple new instructions and is CMOS instead of NMOS so the undocumented 6502 opcodes are gone. You can still buy new ones from WDC.

[Anonymous No.6895723]

>>6895338
Oh rly. You may remember that TI and Micron lobbied Congress to put import quotas on Japanese DRAM because they were the only US-based DRAM manufacturers at the time and as you've noted, Micron sucked balls. The result was RAM shortages and high prices for a while. Thanks, guys. We appreciated it.

[Anonymous No.6895727]

>>6894762
You pretty much got what you need. A Mockingboard I'm sure will add an extra element to some games, and did get some support from the bigger publishers like Electronic Arts.

Cards people may have had:
Parallel card to connect a printer (which I'm sure you probably won't bother with.)
Super Serial Card to connect printers or modems. Can also see more modern use as an interface for ADTpro to transfer disk images.
Mouse card, not a hugely supported device.
Ramworks, to replace that extended 80-column card (that little card next to the power supply.) But unless you plan to use Appleworks, it won't see much use. If you do get a Ramworks, and it's not fully populated, keep an eye out for an old 286 machine, if the RAM is socketed, you can transfer those.

[Anonymous No.6895738]

>>6895727
Parallel cards are pretty useless since Apple pre-USB used almost exclusively serial printers and parallel was rarely supported by software.

[Anonymous No.6895771]

>>6895738
I and everyone I knew had a parallel printer. Wasn't for a while did I get an Imagewriter. I even acquired a Silentype for a bit.

[Anonymous No.6895842]

>>6895727
The graphics setup on the Apple II is, well, strange.

>every three bytes indicates one pixel
>two of the bytes are the color and the third inverts the NTSC burst
>00=black, 11=white, 01=green, 10=purple and if you have bit 3 on then they become blue and orange instead
>the bits are also arranged in memory the reverse from how it appears on the screen--anything written on the right side of the screen will display on the left and vice versa

[Anonymous No.6895862]

>>6895727
The graphics setup on the Apple II is, well, strange.

>every three bits of the HGR page indicates one pixel
>two of the bits are the color and the third inverts the NTSC burst
>00=black, 11=white, 01=green, 10=purple and if you have bit 3 on then they become blue and orange instead
>the bits are also arranged in memory the reverse from how it appears on the screen--anything written on the right side of the screen will display on the left and vice versa

[Anonymous No.6895901]

>>6886084
The Spectrum is easier to code for than the Apple II and feels less hacky (why wouldn't it? it's newer by half a decade), at least until you try to do multiload games in which case you start disliking cassette storage very quickly. The Apple II was known back in the day for its speedy disk drives; an entire 140k disk side can be copied in only 13 seconds.

[Anonymous No.6895940]

>>6895862
My understanding was each pixel is one bit. If you set the color to purple, and plotted a line, only the odd-numbered pixels would be lit ... if you were to plot purple on all the even-numbered pixels, the screen would be blank. Green would only light up the even numbered pixels. plotting white would light up even or odd.

Pixels were grouped 7 to a byte, the 8th bit determined the color palette they used. (green/purple or blue/orange) so if you tried to to plot a palette 2 color where there are palette 1 pixels, the other pixels in the group would shift their color.

Memory layout also had the "Venetian-blind" effect. If you filled the video memory in sequence, the first line on the screen would fill, then jump 8? lines down, and so on, then jump back up to second line (and 8 after that, and so forth.) I don't know about that reverse thing you mention. I don't recall anything like that.

[Anonymous No.6895967]

>>6895940
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#High-Resolution_(Hi-Res)_graphics

Nah I was right. Two bits per pixel. It works because the NTSC clock is half the resolution of the pixel clock. On some monitors you will see faint vertical bars on the screen because the NTSC burst stays constant from line to line while normal broadcast NTSC flips it 180 degrees each line and causes a checkerboard pattern instead. There's no chroma in the Apple II's video signal, only luminance and color burst.

[Anonymous No.6895989]

>>6883282
Quite a few early PC games were copypasted from the Apple II because the two systems were more similar than a PC and an Atari 800.

[Anonymous No.6896002]

>>6895338
>that kid who makes even more of a fool of himself by explaining the "news" everyone rolled their eyes at

[Anonymous No.6896003]

Stuff as simple as the balloon program in the C64 manual would be hard to pull off on an Apple II and involve a lot of XORing bitmaps around. Things that you can do easily on systems with custom chips become a major PITA and require you to be a wizard at 6502 assembly language. And there's no IRQs at all, unless you have a Mockingboard or mouse card which can generate one for you.

[Anonymous No.6896008]

>>6896003
the Apple II's BASIC at least had actual graphics commands which the C64 didn't. I hate the screen editor in Applesoft BASIC though.

[Anonymous No.6896023]

>>6895712
you were more likely to encounter undocumented opcodes in copy protections than software itself

[Anonymous No.6896027]

>>6895967
>Each row of 280 pixels was broken up into 40 blocks of seven pixels each, represented in a single byte.

Left is what you'd see on a monochrome monitor. Blue & Orange belong to the same palette. Notice the blue region only lights up the pixels in one column set, orange lights up the pixels in the other set. Where you see white, adjacent pixels are lit.

While I didn't have a Burrell Smith level of hardware knowledge. I did program the //e back then. I do have a vague recollection of white pixels being "fat" but could be Applesoft just light up both pixels in a pairing, no matter which one you addressed. (ie. HPLOTting white 0,0 also lit up 1,0)

[Anonymous No.6896452]

>>6895309
Ebluejay sells original plastic switches, and I could probably buy at least one of them on eBay, as I see a few posters selling a “take your pic” lot of key caps for the iie.

[Anonymous No.6896459]

>>6896452
take your pick*

[Anonymous No.6896823]

bump

[Anonymous No.6897239]

And there was also the DHGR mode which isn't supported by BASIC and is very slow (plus it use a huge 16k memory page). It was basically a hack of 80 column text mode with all points addressable pixels.

[Anonymous No.6897269]

>>6885848
>also avoid Apple II ports of Sierra AGI games, they suck harder than a very large vacuum
Why? They're unbelievably slow and have no sound, plus a lot of content was cut due to memory constraints. In Manhunter: New York, the game offers you a cheat feature to bypass the sewer since there just wasn't enough memory to fit the map in. In KQ3 there's no clock to show how much time is remaining when Mannanan is out of town which makes the game much harder than it would be on the PC. Honestly, these ports shouldn't have even been attempted. Somehow though, the Apple II got every single AGI adventure except Manhunter: San Francisco (the very last AGI release).

[Anonymous No.6897285]

>>6897239
Is it actually useful for anything?

[Anonymous No.6897291]

>>6897285
Gives you 16 color graphics at a big memory/performance penalty.

[Anonymous No.6897303]

>>6897291
If I have the iie enhanced, which I think has 128k, plus a 64k ram expansion, would that extra requirement even be an issue?

[Anonymous No.6897313]

>>6897303
All machines that can use DHGR are 128k ones since the hardware support for the mode was included in the 128k card on the IIe. If you had a base 64k IIe then there's no DHGR mode.

[Anonymous No.6897334]

The IIe debuted in early 1983 but Apple didn't bring out the DHGR/128k card until a year later and the early IIes with the Revision 0 board couldn't use it--Apple offered free PCB swaps for the newer revision and it would be really rare to come across a Revision 0 IIe.

[Anonymous No.6897335]

>>6897313
Ah, I see. So the extra 64k would basically stop the slowdown, and it would run normally, or what would happen? Sorry for all the questions, I’m pretty new to using vintage computers in general

[Anonymous No.6897337]

>>6897335
Extra 64k ram card*

[Anonymous No.6897343]

>>6897335
No it would still be slow as dog poop because you're using a 1Mhz CPU to drag around a 16k graphics page.

>>6897269
See here. The Apple ports of Sierra AGI games were all DHGR and are terribly slow and have no sound because the CPU isn't fast enough to animate the graphics and operate the speaker at the same time.

Maniac Mansion was also on the Apple II and is DHGR; it too has no sound.

[Anonymous No.6897354]

>>6897343
Hmm, are there any cards that give the CPU a “boost” of the sorts? I should probably research the stock hardware more, instead of worrying about cards.

[Anonymous No.6897368]

>>6897354
It's called a IIgs. You can run 8-bit Apple II games on a IIgs in 2Mhz mode and DHGR stuff will actually be fast enough to be playable (really helps if you were running those Sierra adventures).

[Anonymous No.6897376]

>>6897368
Damn, I have to get the next iteration to play the game, or just emulate. That sucks, I don’t want to pay eBay prices for that kind of stuff. Are such games even worth playing, or would they be skippable?

[Anonymous No.6897387]

>>6897376
As I said, you honestly don't need to play the Apple II ports of Sierra adventures and they're even missing a bunch of stuff due to limited memory. There's literally no reason to not just play the PC versions instead (plus they're hard disk installable and don't necessitate nonstop disk swapping).

[Anonymous No.6897431]

https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/apple2/faq/11-004-What-are-some-games-in-double-hires.html

This lists 52 games that support DHGR, but it's also missing a few things. I know that some Microprose games could use it (eg. the "Command" trilogy and Pirates!).

https://www.mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/attributeId,386/offset,25/p,31/so,0a/

And this lists 48 games, with some different stuff. Wheel of Fortune is another one I know that uses DHGR and is not in either list. There may also be any number of educational titles that support it since those tend to be rather poorly documented.

[Anonymous No.6897464]

>>6891070
>doesn’t answer the question, just calls him underage
If you didn’t know the answer, why’d you respond?

[Anonymous No.6897946]

>>6897387
Damn, I forgot disk swapping was something you had to do back then. Ill be using that one method where you use an aux cord to load games via an audio file, making the computer think it’s using a cassette. Would there be any issues with that?

[Anonymous No.6897971]

>>6897946
Cassette games are just going to be single load arcade stuff. All the RPG, adventure, and strategy titles are multiload and multidisk games.

[Anonymous No.6898017]

>>6897431
as someone else said, Apple II educational games aren't documented too well and some could even not be dumped. back in the day, pirate/cracker groups didn't typically want to bother with eduware because the ones who did became ridiculed around the warez community.

[Anonymous No.6898036]

>>6897971
I’ll be more specific. http://asciiexpress.net/diskserver/readme.html This guy has converted about 1500 games to audio files, 3-6 minutes long maybe. You can just connect your phone or laptop to the apple ii, and play the file, the game will load. You can even write games to floppy disks using this method.

[Anonymous No.6898078]

>>6898036
Yes those are all single load titles like Pac-Man or Hard Hat Mack. The disk isn't used for anything but the initial load of the game so they can be easily converted to a cassette file.

[Anonymous No.6898123]

>>6898078
There are several games on that list which used multiple floppy disks. Did you actually look at it, or did you just assume that?

[Anonymous No.6898502]

http://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/

I think he meant this link which lets you download single load games via the cassette port.

[Anonymous No.6898565]

>>6885928
There is something of an online community for the Apple II, it's weird boomers who think they're in the movie WarGames and keep a low profile where they prefer to use low tech sites like FTPs. The fact that they're all Americans makes their mentality noticeably different from the Commodore guys who are all Europeans and have normal websites and forums that aren't run like a secret clubhouse you need national security clearance to get into.

>>6898502
This is pretty much how you'd expect an Apple II site to look like.

[Anonymous No.6899775]

bump