Apple ]['s and C=64 video/ Bad Feelings...

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_crl.com>
Date: Mon Jun 23 11:17:16 1997

On Sun, 22 Jun 1997, tiborj wrote:

> Hello there, I an fairly new here, but I am interested in all kinds of
> hardware and software hacks.
> Someone out there mentioned the 'sophistication' of the Apple ]['s video
> addressing, saying that the
> RAM refresh steals CPU cycles, Apples method is worse than a kludge, it was
> simply a crufted idea. yes, the Disk II is an elegent kludge,as ALL of my
> homebrewed electronic gear are kludges just to make them work!<G>. My first
> computer was a Commodore 64, and comparing it to apples(not oranges :0) the
> 64 is WAY more advanced, and it too shares a medium populated motherboard. I
> can do 90% of the multimedia stuff on the 64 as you can with a P-133! my
> point being, the Apple and 64 both had 6502 compatible proccessors, but the
> 6510 used by the 64 has smarter memory mangament, and it is fast enough to
> refresh the ram AND do sprite graphics AND use bit mapped memory. adding

Unfortunately your comparison is invalid since the C64 had a seperate
chip for sound as well as graphics. The Apple used one 6502 to process
everything.

> perhiperals to the 64 via the serial bus worked NICE, and I can prove
> history is repeating itself. Look at the new USB (Universal Serial Bus)

If not slow as hell. The worst part about the commodore 1541 drive is
that it had its own processor, and it was still slow. The bottleneck was
the serial interface. Commodore was lame not to use something faster
than, what was it, 19.2K? In contrast, the Apple Disk ][ could transfer
data at about a rate of 16K per second.

> standard, where they want to run evrything from keyboards, mice, modems
> etc... the Wintel croud calls it BRAND NEW IDEA, but we did this 10 years or
> more ago. I got a good taste of Apple's machines in school, and they were

Yeah, it was called daisy-chaining.


Sam
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Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass
Received on Mon Jun 23 1997 - 11:17:16 BST