Even a good percentage of the games utilized it, if not required it. Without it, you couldnt really use any of the more useful software on the machine.

And I cant remember seing a single one that didnt have the 80 column card. From the time I was in elementary school in the early 80s, all the way through highschool in the late 80s, I bet I saw THOUSANDS of Apple II machines, both at school, and at friends' houses. I dont think Ive ever actually USED an Apple II that didnt have the 80 column card. Needless to say, the IIgs had the same capabilities. The IIc came standard with it, and so did the Laser 128. If you owned a II+ or IIe without the 80 column card, you really werent going to run about half the software that was produced during most of the apple II's span of popularity. I would argue that it was very much part of the standard. An SIO2Apple would likewise require quite an involved hardware/software combination.Īs far as the 80 column card not being part of the standard. (Actually there is one now, but its a whole PCB worth of logic, rather than just a simple serial adaptor like comparable suystems on the ATARI & C=).

This is also why there is no Apple2PC disk drive emulation systems. This made apple's disk interface one of the fastest and most low-level programmable interfaces around. WHat? Apple used minimal hardware on their floppy controller? Apple had their floppy controler chip on the motherboard, and actually directly controlled the drives' head steppers and bidirectional serial interface via hardware. I think it would even be cool to have an SIO2Apple floppy adaptor atr file? I know Apple used minimal hardware on their drive controllers so the CPU might be trying to access non-exsistant hardware, but I'm sure this problem has been addressed by various PC emulators. not from a real apple disk, but from a disk image file, something similar to an. As far as the Atari not being able to emulate Apple floppies yet, would it be possible read and write sectors. I think the point is that if your Atari *is* expanded, can you use those expansions to emulate Apple expansions? Of course there's going to be Apple add-ons that are harder to emulate, but some things (like floppy drives and 80 column hardware) were fairly common place. You can always make a particular model harder to emulate by adding some hardware expansion like a Video Toaster to Amiga, PGA card to PC, etc. If you compare 16-bit models, Mac would be easiest to emulate from Atari ST, Amiga, PC (16-bit models w/EGA), and Mac. Apple II's standard is 280*192 and that's easily do-able by a standard Commodore 64, Atari, and PC (8-bit models w/CGA). How does it handle 80 columns or DOUBLE HI-RES graphics? Or LOW RES 16 color mode?Īs far as resolution goes, it would be unfair to compare Apple expansions (80-column card) with an nonexpanded atari.

Mac atari emulator