don't settle for chess on the Atari 2600 when you can be playing Myst on the Atari 2600: http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/myst_vcs/
I'm trying to get it to the speed-runnable state before Mysterium next week, we'll see how that goes
443 karma · joined June 4, 2020
I'm trying to get it to the speed-runnable state before Mysterium next week, we'll see how that goes
Later models you can bypass the floating bus/vapor lock and get VBLANK from a register (but IIe/IIc/IIgs all do it differently). I coincidentally released a 256 byte demoscene demo using this today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWq57yeu4gQ
Apple II nostalgia is not due to modern Apple's success. The people keeping it alive actually are often hostile to modern Apple, never forgiving them for killing off the Apple II in lieu of the macintosh. (See "Apple II forever" or attend a Kansasfest sometime)
a lot of key early gaming milestones happened on the Apple II, for a variety of reasons. One was the extremely clever floppy drive controller made by Woz. You could have actual decent sized games that would load in seconds. I know there's a lot of weird nostalgia for waiting large fractions of an hour for screeching bits to load off of tape, but that wasn't great for complex games.
Don't overlook the education market, a large set of Gen-X used apple IIs at school, and there was an immense educational software market
Business was big too, especially Visi-calc. It was used in much more serious ways than later 8-bit machines. To the point if you look closely at the original IBM PC you can see its design closely matches the Apple II in many ways, as that's what IBM was worried about. The c64 didn't even exist yet when that was happening.
Expansion, having a machine with a case with room for 8 expansion boards of fully documented slots is so much fun for hacking compared to trying to shoe-horn things into a mass of wires and loose-connector cartridges hanging out the back of your machine.
Finally cost, the II has a reputation of a rich-kid machine. Which is true, but everyone gets all excited about DOS gaming and during the DOS/PC age most PCs were really expensive as well.
back in the day the reverse caused problems too, you can look up the grumbling of people porting Prince of Persia to non-Apple II systems and having to convert all the multiple-of-7 graphics to systems expecting things to be multiples of 8
and a bunch of games written in the past 5 years http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/demakes/
more info on finding the vblank w/o an interrupt using the floating bus, sometimes called "vapor lock" http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/megademo/vapor_lock.html
all of these have full source code available
Not that I necessarily blame him, fairly burnt out on academia myself currently.
Not getting a CAREER award can really set one back, both in time wasted applying but then having to compete with those who have them. I often felt like the NSF asks for so much these days, including excessive (and possibly unrealistic amounts of) K-12 outreach. I am always curious if you go back after 5 years, how many of the winners actually did everything they promised in the proposal.
also look up the byte-battles, the live head-to-head 256-byte programming tournamet
If you're a commodore person, you should be comparing this with what you could do with a PET or maybe a VIC-20 in this timeframe (not a C64).
If you use "hi-res" (140x192x6 colors) the graphics are 8k, 8 times bigger, so you need 24 disks which is a bit much.
Also with double-buffered hi-res graphics you waste 16k of RAM which is 1/3 of all available RAM on a II+. Double-buffered lo-res only takes 2k.