Comments for Apple II Adventures

Comment on Money in Space – Earth Orbit Stations by PY

PY — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:26:04 +0000

Oh yeah. One other thing y’all should know. The game does *not* work on the GS.

Comment on The Apple II Gets a Music Keyboard by Taggart Snyder

Taggart Snyder — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:26:53 +0000

Wow! That brings back memories. I remember mucking about with the Soundchaser system back in college *blah-blah* years ago. Fun stuff! Thanks, for the memories!

Taggart Snyder

Comment on The Apple II Gets a Music Keyboard by Mozomedia Music Podcast – Ep 7 (Enhanced) : Mozomedia Music

Mozomedia Music Podcast – Ep 7 (Enhanced) : Mozomedia Music — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:57:30 +0000

[...] of Nowhere, from Auricular Records. – ‘Boxy’s Lament’ by J.J. Sonick, a new Apple II composition. Email us at music@mozomedia.com See you next [...]

Comment on The Apple II Gets a Music Keyboard by MOZOMEDIA MUSIC PODCAST – EP 7 : Mozomedia Music

MOZOMEDIA MUSIC PODCAST – EP 7 : Mozomedia Music — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:56:12 +0000

[...] of Nowhere, from Auricular Records. – ‘Boxy’s Lament’ by J.J. Sonick, a new Apple II composition. Email us at music@mozomedia.com See you next [...]

Comment on New Apple II song, Jpegs to HGR screens by JJ Sonick

JJ Sonick — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:46:59 +0000

Woah – just a follow-up, I’ve tried some other more colorful pics and they were much less successful haha. Making the original jpg black and white (indexed color – 2 color) before converting to HGR seems to give decent results though. So: similar to HGR color palette or strict B&W seem best. I’ll post more on this later…

Comment on New Apple II song, Jpegs to HGR screens by JJ Sonick

JJ Sonick — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:14:41 +0000

Thanks, Jeff! It is just a standard HGR screen on a stock composite monitor, but like I said, the photo makes it look a somewhat better than reality. The Apple II HGR screen can actually display some nice images, it’s just a *lot* of work if you’re not cheating something like a jpg-to-HGR utility. That’s because if you’re programming, you have to deal with the bizarre way the screen is arranged in memory just to get your image to appear and then you have to deal with the obnoxious ways the colors can bleed over if they are next to eachother (again, a consequence of the way the screen is represented in memory). Even if you’re using one of the nice mouse- or tablet-driven drawing programs that came out back then, the color issue can be quite annoying. But there are examples from back in the day of nice HGR screens, like from Beyond Castle Wolfenstein -
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/593/bwolfso0.jpg
Windwalker –
http://www.retrocpu.com/apple-ii/images/games/w/windwalker.png
Rescue Raiders notice how carefully the colors are kept separated by black except for the ground) -
http://www.retrocpu.com/apple-ii/images/games/r/rescue_raiders.png
Aztec -
http://www.retrocpu.com/apple-ii/images/games/a/aztec.png

Also I think the spaceship’s color scheme ended up playing nice with the HGR screen’s 6 colors – more colorful pics will probably fair much poorer – I’ll find out soon!

Comment on New Apple II song, Jpegs to HGR screens by jeff

jeff — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:28:57 +0000

This is so very cool. Good to see another post here. Love the music, especially. Thanks for hooking that up.

Also, what kind of HGR screen is in the picture? Is that the standard //e hi-res on a composite monitor? Or is it enhanced somehow with duoble-hires or a special RGB display? Or what? Because I can’t believe a stock //e could reproduce that spaceship thingy so well.

Comment on Hi-Res Graphics Mind Meld by JJ Sonick

JJ Sonick — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:37:17 +0000

Thanks, Jonathan! I actually have a copy of that book but haven’t read it – I’ll be sure to check it out. I’ve actually been leaning towards exploiting Penguin Software’s The Graphics Magician’s routines for dealing with graphics in programs, but I may still end-up hand-rolling some stuff, too, so explanations like yours are very helpful.

Comment on The Apple II Gets a Music Keyboard by JJ Sonick

JJ Sonick — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:28:41 +0000

Timethy, sorry for the late reply, but congrats on getting that Nibble stuff – I want to get that full collection soon, too. And that project sounds great – definitely let me know how it goes!

Comment on Hi-Res Graphics Mind Meld by Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:28:21 +0000

My favorite book was “Apple Graphics and Arcade Game Design”

It’s pretty easy for HGR…
Essentially you need to figure out your ROW address then add to it your column address. Sure there are lots of silly algorithms to calculate the Woz’s complicated framebuffer layout but most people just use a lookup table. i.e. have two lists of bytes in memory, one representing the low byte of the initial address of each hi-res row and the other representing the hi-byte. Then do something like this:

LDX #COLUMN ; It’s best to think of the hi-res screen as 40 columns of bytes where every bit in the byte (except for the “7th”) is a monochrome pixel. On a colour screen each pair of pixels can be arranged into one of four patterns which make a colour – The 7th bit of the byte the pattern resides in could be thought of as setting the “pallet”

LDY #ROW; This is more straight forward as each byte of screen memory writes to a single horizontal line on the screen.

LDA $LOWTABEL,Y; $LOWTABLE here is an address in memory which has the low byte of each row.
STA ZEROPAGE; Store it to some zeropage location.
LDA $HITABLE,Y; This is a table of the high bytes
STA ZEROPAGE+1; Store it to the next zero page location

LDA #BYTEYOUWANTTOWRITETOTHESCREEN; Take the value you want to store into screen memory and load it into the accumulator

STA ($ZEROPAGE),X; This writes it to the desired row or column of the screen.