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I had an Apple][+ back in the day. You have to understand that the Apple][ predates what we think of as 8-bit computers by a few years and the fact it was cheap

I had an Apple][+ back in the day. You have to understand that the Apple][ predates what we think of as 8-bit computers by a few years and the fact it was cheap enough to mass produce was a minor miracle. Corners were cut everywhere, the Apple][+ didn't even have lowercase letters, a way to detect key up events, or a sensible frame buffer in hires mode. In its defense, it also predates a lot of what we take for granted. The idea that a game might want to scroll smoothly or update at 50/60 FPS without flickering just didn't occur to people in 1979.

mrob 1y ago
Galaxian was released in 1979 and features a smooth scrolling background and non-flickering sprites, all at 60 FPS. It's especially notable because it was the first game to use dedicated tiles + sprites graphics hardware, which would become the standard for arcade and console hardware and the main reason why those games looked different from computer games. The earlier Space Invaders (1978) had the CPU draw to a computer-style frame buffer with minimal hardware acceleration (only a barrel shifter to speed up horizontal movement). This was too slow to update all the aliens at 60 FPS so they would only speed up as the number remaining decreased (which worked out well from a gameplay point of view, but the original reason was a technical limitation).
- AndrewStephens 1y ago
  OK, you are technically (the best kind of) correct. Some people were thinking of scrolling and sprites in 1979 but those people were using expensive dedicated hardware that would take a few years to filter down to home computers once people saw the advantages.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    It’s easy to forget how far apart the low and and high end used to be. When the 8-bit Apple ][ was the hot home computer, you could buy machines with 32-bit CPUs with megabytes of RAM, virtual memory, and floating point, running a multitasking, multiuser OS. But such a thing cost more than a luxury car, maybe more than a nice house. Cost was the innovation for those early home computers. They weren’t doing anything remarkable, except for doing it at a price ordinary people could actually afford. If you were willing to spend more (because the computer ran your payroll, or because the computer got people to drop quarters into it all day long) you could get much more capable stuff. These days you can drop a few hundred bucks and get something that’s not too far off from the best that money can buy. The main difference between a cheap PC and what passes for a “supercomputer” these days is that the supercomputer has much better interconnects and there’s just a lot more of it.
    - philiplu 1y ago
      My first computer, purchased in 1978 for about $700, was an 8k Commodore PET. I've just finished building my first new PC in 15 years; a Zen 5 9950X with 96G RAM and a 4TB PCIe-5 SSD for about $2800. That's roughly the same, inflation-adjusted, as that PET! It's been a real trip watching the accumulation of exponential improvements the past 50 years.
      - wat10000 1y ago
        And if you managed to go out and spend a million dollars on a computer instead, it wouldn’t be all that different from what you bought here. The CPUs would be very similar, similar RAM and storage, etc. It would be a lot more powerful, but that mostly comes from scaling horizontally. More RAM, more CPUs, more everything. But it will run the same sort of software and run most of it about as fast, just more of it at once.
  - vardump 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_computers Atari 800 Home Computer System was released in 1979 and had both bitmap and character graphics as well as sprites.
    - AndrewStephens 1y ago
      The Atari really did have amazing graphics capabilities but the basic Apple][ design predates it by at least 2 years. Apple were slow to add graphical enhancements to the ][ line, perhaps not wanting to be labeled as a mere "gaming" machine.
    - EvanAnderson 1y ago
      Atari had the capital to use custom ASICs to provide that functionality. The Apple II was all off-the-shelf parts.
    - DerekL 1y ago
      It also supported smooth scrolling.

mrob 1y ago

Galaxian was released in 1979 and features a smooth scrolling background and non-flickering sprites, all at 60 FPS. It's especially notable because it was the first game to use dedicated tiles + sprites graphics hardware, which would become the standard for arcade and console hardware and the main reason why those games looked different from computer games. The earlier Space Invaders (1978) had the CPU draw to a computer-style frame buffer with minimal hardware acceleration (only a barrel shifter to speed up horizontal movement). This was too slow to update all the aliens at 60 FPS so they would only speed up as the number remaining decreased (which worked out well from a gameplay point of view, but the original reason was a technical limitation).

AndrewStephens 1y ago
OK, you are technically (the best kind of) correct. Some people were thinking of scrolling and sprites in 1979 but those people were using expensive dedicated hardware that would take a few years to filter down to home computers once people saw the advantages.
- wat10000 1y ago
  It’s easy to forget how far apart the low and and high end used to be. When the 8-bit Apple ][ was the hot home computer, you could buy machines with 32-bit CPUs with megabytes of RAM, virtual memory, and floating point, running a multitasking, multiuser OS. But such a thing cost more than a luxury car, maybe more than a nice house. Cost was the innovation for those early home computers. They weren’t doing anything remarkable, except for doing it at a price ordinary people could actually afford. If you were willing to spend more (because the computer ran your payroll, or because the computer got people to drop quarters into it all day long) you could get much more capable stuff. These days you can drop a few hundred bucks and get something that’s not too far off from the best that money can buy. The main difference between a cheap PC and what passes for a “supercomputer” these days is that the supercomputer has much better interconnects and there’s just a lot more of it.
  - philiplu 1y ago
    My first computer, purchased in 1978 for about $700, was an 8k Commodore PET. I've just finished building my first new PC in 15 years; a Zen 5 9950X with 96G RAM and a 4TB PCIe-5 SSD for about $2800. That's roughly the same, inflation-adjusted, as that PET! It's been a real trip watching the accumulation of exponential improvements the past 50 years.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      And if you managed to go out and spend a million dollars on a computer instead, it wouldn’t be all that different from what you bought here. The CPUs would be very similar, similar RAM and storage, etc. It would be a lot more powerful, but that mostly comes from scaling horizontally. More RAM, more CPUs, more everything. But it will run the same sort of software and run most of it about as fast, just more of it at once.
- vardump 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_computers Atari 800 Home Computer System was released in 1979 and had both bitmap and character graphics as well as sprites.
  - AndrewStephens 1y ago
    The Atari really did have amazing graphics capabilities but the basic Apple][ design predates it by at least 2 years. Apple were slow to add graphical enhancements to the ][ line, perhaps not wanting to be labeled as a mere "gaming" machine.
  - EvanAnderson 1y ago
    Atari had the capital to use custom ASICs to provide that functionality. The Apple II was all off-the-shelf parts.
  - DerekL 1y ago
    It also supported smooth scrolling.