This post is coming from someone who happened to be in the market for the EXACT thing you just made:
Put a socket to use an original BIOS ROM.
I personally don't care about color AT ALL, and back in the day I never saw anyone using color because it looked like crp, for a couple different reasons.
If it's a kit, everything must be through hole, so no P2. I imagine you're too busy to do anything other than a kit.
Must be able to use original disc drive, because surprisingly after all these decades, all my old discs still work. (maybe have a utility so I can back them up to SD?)
Sell for maybe $250? I'm trying to be reasonable because I am looking at the laser etched acrylic enclosure.
If no keyboard provided, just specify which available part to use, so that I have the correct keyboard to nicely fit the frame
(I assume expansion slots are the same as the original apple, so existing sound card and serial port card will work)
Please have ready in three months, before Xmas
I haven't seen anything like this, I've looked for one already, so you would have the niche totally cornered. And all/most of the work is already done?
There is a little fact about these Apple computers that I think most people don't know.
I was going through boxes of my dad's old paperwork and saw original receipts for the Apple system he bought. He paid over $4K . I was flabbergasted. In 2020 dollars, that's basically the price of a new (cheap) car.
That would explain why only schools had them, and none of my classmates did. All my classmates had the C64, and one had an Atari.
How Apple made that business model work, must have been a schools-only strategy.
Yes, that 4k back then was around 4 months average workers wages. I had an inbetween stint working in an Apple store fixing Apple II's and being able to play with the new girl "Lisa". An Apple II is what I cut my teeth on in learning Forth and I used it to interactively diagnose faults on the machine and align hard drives etc. When I left to design POS terminals I used Forth and 6502 based Rockwell 6511 chips in the design. For the next two decades I used 6502 based MCUs in a plethora of designs, onto the 16-bit 65816 and then shortly thereafter the M37702 which was a faster enhanced 65816 with all the peripherals and A/D etc, an MCU. Then the whole 7700 line was replaced with the C friendly M16C, what a total stuff-up that was. Bye bye Mitsubishi. Soon after they merged with Hitachi and formed Renesas which was then later taken over by NEC. Should have stuck to the very efficient 6502 based micros Mitsi, I say. They used those 7700s by the truck load in HDDs at the time.
In the U.S. Apple ][ & later Apple 2e prices were around $1100 USD... Of course, you were adding displays, peripherals and memory cards to complete the system. A couple of floppy drives added about $900 USD. A 20MB hard drive was about $1200 USD. Makes today's computer prices seem reasonable!
Yes, the price was pretty steep! Even as a kid I realized the incredible sacrifice my parents made to buy this. My mom was a teacher, so I'm not sure if maybe she got a special discount. My mom especially has always had this fascination with technology and I think she realized the impact the Apple II would have even way back then. Like Chip mentioned earlier, the quality of the machine was in a class of its own.
My dad started bringing home an Apple ][ from work on the weekends in 1979 when I was in the 6th grade. Ken would have been in the 4th grade. That was my introduction. I soon got a newspaper-delivery route so I could buy my own Apple ][. It took maybe six months from when we placed the order to when it arrived. Lots of anticipation. The base unit was about $2,000 then.
Don't forget the software bundle. Even basic utilities cost extra and you had to have VisiCalc which was the reason a lot of people bought these complicated newfangled computers.
Yes, it was. When the first clones came along I could assemble a system comparable to the top of the line PC's and sell it for about 6K and still make a reasonable profit.
A friend and I used to drive from Sydney to Melbourne each weekend to pick up 10 Clones (and return one faulty clone) - a trip of 600km each way. This was a carload (station wagon full).
We would burn in those clones for 48 hours which would yield 9 working units after we swapped all the faulty bits out. We then sold the 9 clones.
The clone parts were never properly tested, hence the high failure rate. In those days, the parts came from Taiwan.
The Apple ][, //e and /// got the attention of accountants who could do financials and modelling for a few thousand dollars using VisiCalc or supercalc.
The alternatives were a software package on minicomputers which typically cost more than $20K (for only the software). Also when they ran this software it ground all other users to a grinding halt much to their dismay.
This is why Apple really took off. These accountants spread the word quickly, and before long the mini software solutions were on the rails. Of course the EDP (electronic data processing) departments were not amused at losing control of their much protected and lucrative jobs.
In those days, a typical mini-computer was worth $100K - $1M with probably the average around the $250K mark. A typical company with these would have a turnover of around $20M up.
For reference, a VDU (video terminal) on a mini would cost around $3.5K and that was without any extras that may be required to connect it inside the mini. Think of a VDU as a specialised VT100 for the specific mini it connected to.
And, maintenance on the minis cost typically 10%-15% of purchase price per annum.
The best analogy of the computer industry is to the car industry. We would now get a car in the weeties pack and it would get 1,000,000 miles to the gallon! Of course, we would have to remove the engine and put it back for no reason at random intervals
The best analogy of the computer industry is to the car industry. We would now get a car in the weeties pack and it would get 1,000,000 miles to the gallon! Of course, we would have to remove the engine and put it back for no reason at random intervals
That's if you used the "world's most popular" brand just like back when the world's most popular car color was black, because as Henry said "you can have any color as long as it is black" or words to that effect. Linux is free and fast and has a vast storehouse of software prepackaged plus the software store where the free software is also available with source code if you ever want to tweak it. After trying to keep a foot in both camps at the same time and not being successful in either, I completely changed over well over a decade ago and I haven't looked back.
BTW, the reason for two pixels being needed for white, or black, is the NTSC color cycle spanned two pixels.
Wherever there is just one, its frequency exceeds the NTSC colorburst frequency resulting in that pixel being seen by the display as both intensity and color.
Very cool project!
I too learned a lot on Apple machines. First at school, then at home. Like Chip, I worked for one. And had an Atari machine while doing that work
MECC is a huge part of why so many schools had Apple computers. Tons of reasonably licensed education programs and supporting material made it a great drop in solution for schools wanting to begin computer education.
I have a //e machine and display on idle so my granddaughter can play Oregon Trail as intended one day here real soon. That one also has an accelerator and 65816 chip that will clock up to 16Mhz.
The Apple community is still quite active. There would be interest in a machine that can take peripherals, and or one that has hardware ready to read disk images off some form of removable storage.
BTW, the reason for two pixels being needed for white, or black, is the NTSC color cycle spanned two pixels.
Wherever there is just one, its frequency exceeds the NTSC colorburst frequency resulting in that pixel being seen by the display as both intensity and color.
I didn't know that. That's pretty interesting. I had heard somewhere that Woz initially developed the Apple II to output monochrome, and only later figured out that he could manipulate the pixels to display color. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it does seem to fit with how he liked to do a lot of the heavy lifting in software vs hardware.
MECC is a huge part of why so many schools had Apple computers. Tons of reasonably licensed education programs and supporting material made it a great drop in solution for schools wanting to begin computer education.
Yes, I loved MECC growing up. The thing that is most fascinating to me for whatever reason is that MECC was a public agency, not private, that made educational software. I wish we had more companies like that today. A lot of my colleagues and I debate at work on how much we learned from these games, but I still contend that they had great educational content. The ones I remember the most were Oregon Trail of course, Odell Lake and Word Munchers.
In addition Woz, along with many others, abused the NTSC timings so that there would be a fast, stable display. Television, done the Apple way, offers about 160 "pixels" of color detail per line. The Apple showed 140 of those, due to that use of the high bit leaving 7 pixels per byte, 40 bytes per line.
Other machines offered 160 pixels, but no 6 color high res display.
Turns out, looking back, 6 colors is enough to do anything. In my view, that did hold the Apple back. Had it been less, we would have seen video cards more widely adopted. Had it been more? Likely too expensive to take off.
So it all got done on that goofy screen addressing scheme.
Abusing the signal spec some gave us 240p displays and color artifacts that all line up. Many machines that followed the Apple made similar choices, but also added color circuits to improve on display quality.
A notable, very early trade off that I feel shows off how Woz would maximize functionally while minimizing circuits.
Yes, I loved MECC growing up.
Indeed!
Fun times. I agree with you. Our British friends likely have similar thoughts about the BBC Micro and how Acorn and the BBC put together a nice education program.
Then there were the magazines in the grocery store! I tell people about that, reading ROM listings, hacking on games and they almost always say the same thing, "wait! Grocery store?"
What I got out of MECC was familiarity. And a craving to do more. Worked for most of us. Maybe it worked for all of us that it could work on. I don't know.
Yes, the price of home computers back then was very steep. An Apple ][ was $1100 with no peripherals, a TRS80 Model II was $800. And even the cassette deck was a peripheral -- and Commodore didn't even use a standard cassette player. That's why my first computer was an Interact Model One (or as Protecto Enterprises branded it, the model R). This was a 16K computer, thus a step up from the relatively useless TRS80 Model I, included the built-in cassette deck, and used your TV set as a monitor. It was a bit odd in not having a text generator so the text display was drawn in a 5x5 font on its 77 x 112 pixel graphics display, but they were being surplused for only $250 so we could afford it. We bought it from a classified ad in the back of Popular Electronics. Eventually we were able to get a second one so my father and I could computer at the same time.
And it turned out to be great in that to do anything useful with it, I had to learn a lot about both general programming and about how that machine itself worked, which was in turn possible because the machine was pretty simple.
Using a P2 to emulate an Apple ][ begs to be done. Wish I could remember the name of the 6502 assembler I first used. One of its identifying features was the use of ! rather than # to specify immediate addressing.
Using a P2 to emulate an Apple ][ begs to be done. Wish I could remember the name of the 6502 assembler I first used. One of its identifying features was the use of ! rather than # to specify immediate addressing.
I remember using an assembler named L.I.S.A, but then had to switch to Merlin because that's what game developers were using and I was making an Apple ][ --> Commodore 64 downloader. The download was triggered by the USR mnemonic which was customizable.
I can't remember what I used either (they weren't very good) but by the 90's I was able to use a multi-target open-source macro-assembler from Alfred Arnold. It was so much better than anything else and I could program anything 6502/65816/M37700 etc as well as a plethora of other micros, all with a very flexible syntax and great macro capability. It is still maintained even to this day (incredible).
btw. I wrote a 65xx simulator in TAQOZ Forth on the P2 that even runs my old Rockwell R6511 binaries!
Here is the help listing of an older version of the assembler at the command prompt running under Wine in Linux.
macro assembler 1.42 Beta [Bld 28]
(i386-unknown-win32)
(C) 1992,2003 Alfred Arnold
Mitsubishi M16C-Generator also (C) 1999 RMS
XILINX KCPSM(Picoblaze)-Generator (C) 2003 Andreas Wassatsch
TMS320C2x-Generator (C) 1994/96 Thomas Sailer
TMS320C5x-Generator (C) 1995/96 Thomas Sailer
calling convention : asw [options] [file] [options] ...
--------------------
options :
---------
-p : share file formatted for Pascal -c : share file formatted for C
-a : share file formatted for AS
-o <name> : change name of code file
-olist <nname> : change name of list file
-shareout <nname> : change name of share file
-q, -quiet : silent compilation
-cpu <name> : set target processor
-alias <new>=<old> : define processor alias
-l : listing to console -L : listing to file
-i <path>[;path]... : list of paths for include files
-D <symbol>[,symbol]... : predefine symbols
-gnuerrors: error messages in GNU format
-E <name> : target file for error list,
!0..!4 for standard handles
default is <srcname>.LOG
-r : generate messages if repassing necessary
-Y : branch error suppression (see manual)
-w : suppress warnings +G : suppress code generation
-s : generate section list -t : enable/disable parts of listing
-u : generate usage list -C : generate cross reference list
-I : generate include nesting list
-g [map|atmel|noice] : write debug info
-A : compact symbol table
-U : case-sensitive operation
-x : extended error messages -n : add error #s to error messages
-P : write macro processor output -M : extract macro definitions
-h : use lower case in hexadecimal output
source file specification may contain wildcards
implemented processors :
68008 68000 68010 68012 MCF5200 68332 68340
68360 68020 68030 68040
56000 56002 56300
PPC403 PPC403GC MPC505 MPC601 RS6000
MCORE
6800 6301 6811 68HC11K4
6805 68HC05 68HC08
6809 6309
68HC12
68HC16
H8/300L HD6413308 H8/300 HD6413309 H8/300H
HD6475328 HD6475348 HD6475368 HD6475388
SH7000 SH7600 SH7700
6502 65SC02 65C02 MELPS740 6502UNDOC
65816 MELPS7700 MELPS7750 MELPS7751
MELPS4500
M16
M16C M30600M8 M30610 M30620
4004 4040
8008
8021 8022 8039 8048 80C39 80C48 8041
8042
87C750 8051 8052 80C320 80C501 80C502 80C504
80515 80517 80C390 80C251
8096 80196 80196N 80296
8080 8085 8085UNDOC
8086 80186 V30 V35
80960
8X300 8X305
XAG1 XAG2 XAG3
AT90S1200 AT90S2313 AT90S4414 AT90S8515 ATMEGA8 ATMEGA16
AM29245 AM29243 AM29240 AM29000
80C166 80C167
Z80 Z80UNDOC Z180 RABBIT2000Z380
Z8601 Z8604 Z8608 Z8630 Z8631
KCPSM
96C141 93C141
90C141
87C00 87C20 87C40 87C70
47C00 470C00 470AC00
97C241
16C54 16C55 16C56 16C57
16C64 16C84
17C42
ST6210 ST6215 ST6220 ST6225
ST7
ST9020 ST9030 ST9040 ST9050
6804
32010 32015
320C25 320C26 320C28
320C30 320C31
320C203 320C50 320C51 320C53
320C541
32060
TMS9900
TMS70C00 TMS70C20 TMS70C40 TMS70CT20 TMS70CT40 TMS70C02 TMS70C42
TMS70C82 TMS70C08 TMS70C48
370C010 370C020 370C030 370C040 370C050
MSP430
7810 78C10
75402 75004 75006 75008 75268 75304 75306
75308 75312 75316 75328 75104 75106 75108
75112 75116 75206 75208 75212 75216 75512
75516
78070
7720 7725
77230
SC/MP
8070
COP87L84
SC14400 SC14401 SC14402 SC14404 SC14405 SC14420 SC14421
SC14422 SC14424
ACE1101 ACE1202
SYM53C810 SYM53C860 SYM53C815 SYM53C825 SYM53C875 SYM53C895
MB89190
MB90500
1802 1805
peter@peter-OptiPlex-9010:~/PBJ300D/!D/ASM/ASX-new$
Using a P2 to emulate an Apple ][ begs to be done. Wish I could remember the name of the 6502 assembler I first used. One of its identifying features was the use of ! rather than # to specify immediate addressing.
I remember using an assembler named L.I.S.A, but then had to switch to Merlin because that's what game developers were using and I was making an Apple ][ --> Commodore 64 downloader. The download was triggered by the USR mnemonic which was customizable.
Gadzooks! I remember using both of them. By the time I switched to the PC, an AT&T PC 6300, I was extremely good at both writing in R6502 assembler and making use of it, to combine with BASIC on the host.
Now I'm trying to track down an out of work Apple 2C for a PI to Apple 2C project I've been putting on backup mode for the past two to three years now.
btw. I wrote a 65xx simulator in TAQOZ Forth on the P2 that even runs my old Rockwell R6511 binaries!
Awesome! That is very impressive. I remember one of the recent "early adopter" videos mentioned TAQOZ Forth in it and I remember being very intrigued. I thought I heard that it was actually built into the P2, is that right? I'll definitely check it out now, thanks! I've got a few hopefully small items to finish up with this current P1 version of the board but after that I'm really looking forward to starting in on the P2 version.
The P1 surprises me again. I was not expecting to get full color working for this project, but here it is! Thanks again everyone for your help. As a kid all I knew was the green monochrome screen, but this is pretty neat! It's like discovering all these games again in a new way.
I may post a new video soon detailing some of the changes. There's still some work to do on adding back in the monochrome screens as display options, but hopefully that shouldn't take long. The other unexpected outcome of this is that now that I'm not dealing with the color bits and the 7 bit wide columns translations in my hires routine, it doubled my frame rate! So it's clocking in at 106/107 fps vs 50.
Look how bad the text looks in each of the four photos. This would totally clean up in monochrome mode. And all of this just for six garish colors?
This is the same from what I remember as a kid. But I assumed at the time it was only because I was using a TV and RF modulator for color, instead of a proper color monitor. Now I know better.
Saw the Youtube comment that you might offer a PCB and BOM. Is there any chance you will offer the clear enclosure? Very few people can do that on their own I assume
Look how bad the text looks in each of the four photos. This would totally clean up in monochrome mode. And all of this just for six garish colors?
This is the same from what I remember as a kid. But I assumed at the time it was only because I was using a TV and RF modulator for color, instead of a proper color monitor. Now I know better.
You're right, by today's standard's it's pretty bad. I think the way Woz added color to the Apple II was essentially a hack, which explains the clashing and fringe effects. It also is essentially a reduction in resolution going from monochrome because it's going from a 1bpp to a 2bpp video.
But still, I think it's pretty cool. As a kid I think I would have thought it was neat to see some of these games in color. There's details that I hadn't noticed before in monochrome that are showing up in color which is cool.
Saw the Youtube comment that you might offer a PCB and BOM. Is there any chance you will offer the clear enclosure? Very few people can do that on their own I assume
To get the enclosure cut out all I did was send the svg file to ponoko and they ran it through their laser cutter. It took them a few weeks to get the parts sent back to me. I think at the time they were ramping up production of face shields for the hospital workers back in April/May. They may be back to a shorter turn around now.
Hey, that is working pretty good! (and ignore my next few posts, if you are happy that's all that counts. I'm not wanting you to do more work on this. Maybe you want to though. )
The text is going to look poor no matter what, but it can look better (and does on a real machine).
On the real hardware a single color pixel gets the color and remains a single pixel. As it stands right now in your implementation, a single pixel ends up being two, and there are patterns on byte boundaries that won't work out, unless both bytes are considered too.
That is what gets hard about apple graphics. It isn't really two bits per pixel in all cases.
For many cases, that kind of conversion works.
The reality is the color really is just the position in the scanline + whether it's an even or odd byte + the high bit shift to determine which of the two artifact color sets the pixel color can be.
This is also why single line wide fonts generally look bad on an Apple 2.
Comments
Put a socket to use an original BIOS ROM.
I personally don't care about color AT ALL, and back in the day I never saw anyone using color because it looked like crp, for a couple different reasons.
If it's a kit, everything must be through hole, so no P2. I imagine you're too busy to do anything other than a kit.
Must be able to use original disc drive, because surprisingly after all these decades, all my old discs still work. (maybe have a utility so I can back them up to SD?)
Sell for maybe $250? I'm trying to be reasonable because I am looking at the laser etched acrylic enclosure.
If no keyboard provided, just specify which available part to use, so that I have the correct keyboard to nicely fit the frame
(I assume expansion slots are the same as the original apple, so existing sound card and serial port card will work)
Please have ready in three months, before Xmas
I haven't seen anything like this, I've looked for one already, so you would have the niche totally cornered. And all/most of the work is already done?
I was going through boxes of my dad's old paperwork and saw original receipts for the Apple system he bought. He paid over $4K . I was flabbergasted. In 2020 dollars, that's basically the price of a new (cheap) car.
That would explain why only schools had them, and none of my classmates did. All my classmates had the C64, and one had an Atari.
How Apple made that business model work, must have been a schools-only strategy.
dgately
Yes, it was. When the first clones came along I could assemble a system comparable to the top of the line PC's and sell it for about 6K and still make a reasonable profit.
We would burn in those clones for 48 hours which would yield 9 working units after we swapped all the faulty bits out. We then sold the 9 clones.
The clone parts were never properly tested, hence the high failure rate. In those days, the parts came from Taiwan.
The alternatives were a software package on minicomputers which typically cost more than $20K (for only the software). Also when they ran this software it ground all other users to a grinding halt much to their dismay.
This is why Apple really took off. These accountants spread the word quickly, and before long the mini software solutions were on the rails. Of course the EDP (electronic data processing) departments were not amused at losing control of their much protected and lucrative jobs.
In those days, a typical mini-computer was worth $100K - $1M with probably the average around the $250K mark. A typical company with these would have a turnover of around $20M up.
For reference, a VDU (video terminal) on a mini would cost around $3.5K and that was without any extras that may be required to connect it inside the mini. Think of a VDU as a specialised VT100 for the specific mini it connected to.
And, maintenance on the minis cost typically 10%-15% of purchase price per annum.
The best analogy of the computer industry is to the car industry. We would now get a car in the weeties pack and it would get 1,000,000 miles to the gallon! Of course, we would have to remove the engine and put it back for no reason at random intervals
That's if you used the "world's most popular" brand just like back when the world's most popular car color was black, because as Henry said "you can have any color as long as it is black" or words to that effect. Linux is free and fast and has a vast storehouse of software prepackaged plus the software store where the free software is also available with source code if you ever want to tweak it. After trying to keep a foot in both camps at the same time and not being successful in either, I completely changed over well over a decade ago and I haven't looked back.
Wherever there is just one, its frequency exceeds the NTSC colorburst frequency resulting in that pixel being seen by the display as both intensity and color.
Very cool project!
I too learned a lot on Apple machines. First at school, then at home. Like Chip, I worked for one. And had an Atari machine while doing that work
MECC is a huge part of why so many schools had Apple computers. Tons of reasonably licensed education programs and supporting material made it a great drop in solution for schools wanting to begin computer education.
I have a //e machine and display on idle so my granddaughter can play Oregon Trail as intended one day here real soon. That one also has an accelerator and 65816 chip that will clock up to 16Mhz.
The Apple community is still quite active. There would be interest in a machine that can take peripherals, and or one that has hardware ready to read disk images off some form of removable storage.
I agree. Lay out the necessary connectors and such on a larger board and plug one in.
That does look pretty neat. I really like the compact form factor.
I didn't know that. That's pretty interesting. I had heard somewhere that Woz initially developed the Apple II to output monochrome, and only later figured out that he could manipulate the pixels to display color. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it does seem to fit with how he liked to do a lot of the heavy lifting in software vs hardware.
Yes, I loved MECC growing up. The thing that is most fascinating to me for whatever reason is that MECC was a public agency, not private, that made educational software. I wish we had more companies like that today. A lot of my colleagues and I debate at work on how much we learned from these games, but I still contend that they had great educational content. The ones I remember the most were Oregon Trail of course, Odell Lake and Word Munchers.
Other machines offered 160 pixels, but no 6 color high res display.
Turns out, looking back, 6 colors is enough to do anything. In my view, that did hold the Apple back. Had it been less, we would have seen video cards more widely adopted. Had it been more? Likely too expensive to take off.
So it all got done on that goofy screen addressing scheme.
Abusing the signal spec some gave us 240p displays and color artifacts that all line up. Many machines that followed the Apple made similar choices, but also added color circuits to improve on display quality.
A notable, very early trade off that I feel shows off how Woz would maximize functionally while minimizing circuits.
Indeed!
Fun times. I agree with you. Our British friends likely have similar thoughts about the BBC Micro and how Acorn and the BBC put together a nice education program.
Then there were the magazines in the grocery store! I tell people about that, reading ROM listings, hacking on games and they almost always say the same thing, "wait! Grocery store?"
What I got out of MECC was familiarity. And a craving to do more. Worked for most of us. Maybe it worked for all of us that it could work on. I don't know.
And it turned out to be great in that to do anything useful with it, I had to learn a lot about both general programming and about how that machine itself worked, which was in turn possible because the machine was pretty simple.
I remember using an assembler named L.I.S.A, but then had to switch to Merlin because that's what game developers were using and I was making an Apple ][ --> Commodore 64 downloader. The download was triggered by the USR mnemonic which was customizable.
It is still maintained even to this day (incredible).
btw. I wrote a 65xx simulator in TAQOZ Forth on the P2 that even runs my old Rockwell R6511 binaries!
Here is the help listing of an older version of the assembler at the command prompt running under Wine in Linux.
macro assembler 1.42 Beta [Bld 28] (i386-unknown-win32) (C) 1992,2003 Alfred Arnold Mitsubishi M16C-Generator also (C) 1999 RMS XILINX KCPSM(Picoblaze)-Generator (C) 2003 Andreas Wassatsch TMS320C2x-Generator (C) 1994/96 Thomas Sailer TMS320C5x-Generator (C) 1995/96 Thomas Sailer calling convention : asw [options] [file] [options] ... -------------------- options : --------- -p : share file formatted for Pascal -c : share file formatted for C -a : share file formatted for AS -o <name> : change name of code file -olist <nname> : change name of list file -shareout <nname> : change name of share file -q, -quiet : silent compilation -cpu <name> : set target processor -alias <new>=<old> : define processor alias -l : listing to console -L : listing to file -i <path>[;path]... : list of paths for include files -D <symbol>[,symbol]... : predefine symbols -gnuerrors: error messages in GNU format -E <name> : target file for error list, !0..!4 for standard handles default is <srcname>.LOG -r : generate messages if repassing necessary -Y : branch error suppression (see manual) -w : suppress warnings +G : suppress code generation -s : generate section list -t : enable/disable parts of listing -u : generate usage list -C : generate cross reference list -I : generate include nesting list -g [map|atmel|noice] : write debug info -A : compact symbol table -U : case-sensitive operation -x : extended error messages -n : add error #s to error messages -P : write macro processor output -M : extract macro definitions -h : use lower case in hexadecimal output source file specification may contain wildcards implemented processors : 68008 68000 68010 68012 MCF5200 68332 68340 68360 68020 68030 68040 56000 56002 56300 PPC403 PPC403GC MPC505 MPC601 RS6000 MCORE 6800 6301 6811 68HC11K4 6805 68HC05 68HC08 6809 6309 68HC12 68HC16 H8/300L HD6413308 H8/300 HD6413309 H8/300H HD6475328 HD6475348 HD6475368 HD6475388 SH7000 SH7600 SH7700 6502 65SC02 65C02 MELPS740 6502UNDOC 65816 MELPS7700 MELPS7750 MELPS7751 MELPS4500 M16 M16C M30600M8 M30610 M30620 4004 4040 8008 8021 8022 8039 8048 80C39 80C48 8041 8042 87C750 8051 8052 80C320 80C501 80C502 80C504 80515 80517 80C390 80C251 8096 80196 80196N 80296 8080 8085 8085UNDOC 8086 80186 V30 V35 80960 8X300 8X305 XAG1 XAG2 XAG3 AT90S1200 AT90S2313 AT90S4414 AT90S8515 ATMEGA8 ATMEGA16 AM29245 AM29243 AM29240 AM29000 80C166 80C167 Z80 Z80UNDOC Z180 RABBIT2000Z380 Z8601 Z8604 Z8608 Z8630 Z8631 KCPSM 96C141 93C141 90C141 87C00 87C20 87C40 87C70 47C00 470C00 470AC00 97C241 16C54 16C55 16C56 16C57 16C64 16C84 17C42 ST6210 ST6215 ST6220 ST6225 ST7 ST9020 ST9030 ST9040 ST9050 6804 32010 32015 320C25 320C26 320C28 320C30 320C31 320C203 320C50 320C51 320C53 320C541 32060 TMS9900 TMS70C00 TMS70C20 TMS70C40 TMS70CT20 TMS70CT40 TMS70C02 TMS70C42 TMS70C82 TMS70C08 TMS70C48 370C010 370C020 370C030 370C040 370C050 MSP430 7810 78C10 75402 75004 75006 75008 75268 75304 75306 75308 75312 75316 75328 75104 75106 75108 75112 75116 75206 75208 75212 75216 75512 75516 78070 7720 7725 77230 SC/MP 8070 COP87L84 SC14400 SC14401 SC14402 SC14404 SC14405 SC14420 SC14421 SC14422 SC14424 ACE1101 ACE1202 SYM53C810 SYM53C860 SYM53C815 SYM53C825 SYM53C875 SYM53C895 MB89190 MB90500 1802 1805 peter@peter-OptiPlex-9010:~/PBJ300D/!D/ASM/ASX-new$Gadzooks! I remember using both of them. By the time I switched to the PC, an AT&T PC 6300, I was extremely good at both writing in R6502 assembler and making use of it, to combine with BASIC on the host.
Now I'm trying to track down an out of work Apple 2C for a PI to Apple 2C project I've been putting on backup mode for the past two to three years now.
Awesome! That is very impressive. I remember one of the recent "early adopter" videos mentioned TAQOZ Forth in it and I remember being very intrigued. I thought I heard that it was actually built into the P2, is that right? I'll definitely check it out now, thanks! I've got a few hopefully small items to finish up with this current P1 version of the board but after that I'm really looking forward to starting in on the P2 version.
I may post a new video soon detailing some of the changes. There's still some work to do on adding back in the monochrome screens as display options, but hopefully that shouldn't take long. The other unexpected outcome of this is that now that I'm not dealing with the color bits and the 7 bit wide columns translations in my hires routine, it doubled my frame rate! So it's clocking in at 106/107 fps vs 50.
This is the same from what I remember as a kid. But I assumed at the time it was only because I was using a TV and RF modulator for color, instead of a proper color monitor. Now I know better.
You're right, by today's standard's it's pretty bad. I think the way Woz added color to the Apple II was essentially a hack, which explains the clashing and fringe effects. It also is essentially a reduction in resolution going from monochrome because it's going from a 1bpp to a 2bpp video.
But still, I think it's pretty cool. As a kid I think I would have thought it was neat to see some of these games in color. There's details that I hadn't noticed before in monochrome that are showing up in color which is cool.
To get the enclosure cut out all I did was send the svg file to ponoko and they ran it through their laser cutter. It took them a few weeks to get the parts sent back to me. I think at the time they were ramping up production of face shields for the hospital workers back in April/May. They may be back to a shorter turn around now.
The text is going to look poor no matter what, but it can look better (and does on a real machine).
On the real hardware a single color pixel gets the color and remains a single pixel. As it stands right now in your implementation, a single pixel ends up being two, and there are patterns on byte boundaries that won't work out, unless both bytes are considered too.
That is what gets hard about apple graphics. It isn't really two bits per pixel in all cases.
For many cases, that kind of conversion works.
The reality is the color really is just the position in the scanline + whether it's an even or odd byte + the high bit shift to determine which of the two artifact color sets the pixel color can be.
This is also why single line wide fonts generally look bad on an Apple 2.
I will drop a couple pictures here in a minute.