EricBall's Tech Projects - Apple ][ versus CoCo

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Back in the day my family owned a CoCo (partially because my Mom worked at a Radio Shack computer store at the time, so got a discount), but at school I user Apple ][s (pluses and Es). Unlike the C64 (or the Atari 8 bit computers), neither the CoCo or the A2 has any sound or sprite hardware. Yet the A2 had a huge library of games, and I have to ask myself why.

 

I think it was the disk drive. Although a disk add-on existed for the CoCo, cassette tapes were still very popular. And, unlike the A2, the CoCo disk drive (since it used standard hardware) wasn't capable of the same levels of copy protection as the A2.

 

So the A2, with a disk drive, programmers had the advantage of read/write random access copy-protected storage.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/blog/7/entry-7529-apple-versus-coco/