The History of the Apple II as a Gaming Platform 310
Matt Barton writes "Gamasutra is running a feature on the venerable Apple II platform, which practically defined the early home computer industry and was home to many of the greatest games and developers of all time. The authors discuss the platform's lifespan and many iterations, struggles with illegal distribution, and legendary Apple II games such as Prince of Persia, John Madden Football, and Ultima. 'How big of a problem was piracy? Although several software authors claim that they stopped developing games because of rampant piracy and the subsequent loss of revenue, piracy did expose more computer owners to more games than they otherwise would have been -- this was at a time before ubiquitous demos made it easier to "try before you buy." Another benefit of this piracy is that much of the software archived today at online repositories are the cracked versions.'"
The good old days (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple II? Gaming platform? (Score:4, Informative)
[Gamasutra's A History of Gaming Platforms series continues with a look at the Apple II system. Perhaps best-remembered for its ubiquity in U.S. classrooms in the 1980s, the computer was also a popular gaming system. Need to catch up? Check out the first two articles in the series, covering the Commodore 64 and the Vectrex.]
Re:Apple II? Gaming platform? (Score:3, Informative)
TFA much?
And yes, the Apple II series was the first kick-ass game system. I'm old enough to remember first-hand. What was the Apple's competition? The TRS-80? I had one... the games were meh at best. Certainly, in any game that was released on both of those platforms, the Apple's version looked and sounded better.
Oh, yeah. What did Commodore have at this time? The PET? I heard rumors it had games.
Now, contemporaneous with the C64 in the Apple stable was the IIGS. Amazing, but still basically trailing edge. Like the absolute technological pinnacle in steam locomotives at the time that the diesel-electric was becoming the mainstream rail propulsion system. The C64 and the Amiga pwn'd the IIGS in almost every meaningful way. (Yes, I know what I'm talking about. I have all three.)
Let's not forget... (Score:5, Informative)
Achtung! Damn exploding treasure chests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Wolfenstein [wikipedia.org]
Re:My #1 game (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple II? Gaming platform? (Score:3, Informative)
Why does every computer "historian" ALWAYS forgets Commodore 64?
Ultimas all the way to Ultima VI was available on C-64.
1) The C64 was popular but not very historical -- it came out late in 8-bit history -- it came out in 1982. The Apple ][ came out in 1977. As a reminder, 16-bit computers like the IBM PC were already available in 1981.
2) Sure things like Ultima were on the C64 too, but as ports coming months or years after the Apple ][ originals. People like Lord British used the Apple ][ as their premier platform all the way until Ultima 6.
Re:Apple II? Gaming platform? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Best Games (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone with any leads on New World ROMS so I can fire up and install OS 9 or something? I have a stack (50+) of all my old MacAddict CDs and somewhere I know I have an "Inside Mac Games" from around 1996. That thing had on it the first game I ever bought (shareware). Realmz II.
Oh and Warlords. First turn based game I ever played. Man I love that. Although I loved cheats so I would use this program which would search active memory from a program for a value and then change it. (I only had the Warlords Demo, so I'd search for "turn" and when I was approaching 40 turn limit I'd reset it to 10)
And Taskmaker...
I'm laid up from Knee surgery. I know what I'm going to be wanting to do for the rest of the day.
Re:Original Cracked (Score:5, Informative)
The majority of the copy protection routines on the Apple
Something that changes the read/write timing of a disk would be very, very difficult to emulate correctly, 100% of the time. A good fraction of copy-protected files could not even be made into a standard
Re:Apple II? Gaming platform? (Score:5, Informative)
oh, where to begin... these are some of my earliest Apple ][ memories
The Oregon Trail (1970s, diskette version mid '80s)
Odyssey: The Comleat Apventure (1980) - written in integer BASIC, not MS-BASIC
Ultima I (1980)
Zork I (1980)
Zork II (1981)
Sneakers (1981)
Sabotage (1981)
Gorgon (1981)
Space Eggs (1981)
Castle Wolfenstein (1981)
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981 - and Hi Werdna!)
Softporn Adventure (1981) [text - graphical update became Leisure Suit Larry] - had to throw that in
maybe Aztek (may have been 1982...)
I didn't say Akalabeth (prequel to Ultima 1979-80) because I personally found it very unfun, but it was entertaining until I starved for the 300th time. Also the Prisoner (1980?), which some people liked, but I didn't.
Re:Apple II? Gaming platform? (Score:3, Informative)
Ram limited? My Atari 800 had 48K of ram - it had 4 slots for RAM expansion. It also came with 8K standard - double the stock amount in the Apple IIs. Tape drive? Hardly. Never had one for my Atari - I had a floppy drive. The original Apple IIs came with a tape drive. And as for the 400 having "the worst keyboard on the face of the earth" - obviously you never tried typing any significant amounts of code onto the old Timex/Sinlair TI-99 keybaords. Think trying to program using a cell phone keyboard, or a Speak N Spell. Also the Ataris had a MOS 6502 processor running at 1.8 Mhz compared to the MOS 6502 processor running at 1 Mhz in the Apples. So how exactly is the computer running the same processor, but almost twice as fast something you "couldn't do much with" compared to the Apple? Oh yeah, I forgot to add that the price of the Apple II was $1300 compared to the $1000 price of the Atari. So, double the RAM, almost double to processing speed for $300 less. And you are correct - sound on the Apple IIs did suck, but the Ataris had excellent sound. I even had a fully digitized 2 second clip of some Van Halen song that would play on my old 800. And that was still in the 80s.