Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Apple 1 color question for the Woz...


Hi Woz,

I was watching a video on one of your conferences on Apple history timeline up to the A2.
You mentioned tinkering with eventually adding color to the A1.
Did you find this too much of a task or waste of time for the A1, or did you just move on to the A2?
I'm asking because, I'm wondering if this would be possible on one of the clones, maybe one of us can mess around with.
Wondering if an old MC1372 would work....  I played around with the MC6847, straight-forward stuff - my results here:


Best,

John

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From the Woz...


I measured my designs by efficient use of chips.

The Apple I was designed around the U.S. (NTSC) color TV subcarrier frequency so that I could 'try' my digital color idea on it later. But when I went to start adding chips to do this it was about 7 chips alone for the basic timing (things like NTSC sync signals) and I saw that it would be more chips to generate color from my cycling text memory. I see now that it would have worked but thinking about this problem led me to incredible chip efficiencies and reductions of the Apple II. I don't have time to get into detail about it now but there were many other reasons to move to the Apple ][, the main one being the speed of character/graphics management moving from a shifting display memory to normal RAM.

best,

ʞɐıuzoʍ ǝʌǝʇs 

It doesn't work that way
-- Ariana Gilles, John and the Monster

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And followup -- From the Woz...


and somewhere in my files is my short exercise trying to design some color stuff for the Apple I but the Apple lawyers took all my working papers for a lawsuit and I never got them back.
ʞɐıuzoʍ ǝʌǝʇs 