What's the one (or more) features you wanted the Apple II to have?

[JamesD]

 

they did, its the speaker :0

Apple on and off sound in all it's glory (for those that didn't see my post in another area)

 

And the 8 bit DAC

 

[MarkO]

FWIW, here are some of the original magazine articles on the 6509/6516 in 'MICRO The 6502 Journal'.

 

There were 30 opcodes that were to take one less clock cycle than the 6502. That alone would have probably offered a 5% or better speedup.

Page 7:

https://archive.org/details/micro-6502-journal-21

PDF Page 09-11

 

Very "sneaky", hiding the SYS6516 at the bottom of the article...

 

 

It was supposedly only going to be source compatible with the 6502 but they were going to try to change that according to the article.

It switched between 8 and 16 bit modes for X, Y, and SP like the 65816, but several instructions also switched so you could INC a 16 bit number in memory for example.

16 bit relative jumps were to be supported for position independent code.

It had something similar to the LEA instruction on the 6809.

Page Zero was replaced with the Direct Page like the 6809.

And I believe it had additional stack instructions including the ability to PUSH/PULL multiple registers at a time with a single instruction.

The two major omissions I see were no mention of stack relative addressing, and no multiply instruction.

In spite of those omissions, it would have been a beast of a CPU in the 8 bit world

 

Page 36:

https://archive.org/details/micro-6502-journal-23

PDF Pages 36-37

 

 

I would just "love it", if someone had the preliminary SYS6516 ( SYS6509 ) Data Sheet and could Scan It....

 

 

MarkO

[JamesD]

Issue 22 Page 5:

https://ia800500.us.archive.org/12/items/micro-6502-journal-22/micro_22_mar_1980_text.pdf

 

Issue 24 Page 5:

https://ia600706.us.archive.org/23/items/micro-6502-journal-24/micro_24_may_1980_text.pdf

 

 

The last message may indicate the articles were an amalgam of several different designs Synertek looked at.

Edited October 4, 2016 by JamesD

[Britishcar]

To have everything I would have wanted in my //e would have basically turned it into an Atari 800 with 8 slots...that would have been a pretty awesome machine.

[Muzz73]

Back in the day, my complaints were the obvious ones you might expect from a teenager... things that every other computer on the market had that we didn't, such as an actual graphics chip (w/animated hardware sprites & MOBs, collision detection, hardware scrolling, etc.), a sound chip...

 

...but...

 

In retrospect, I think we did fine without those things. Just having CPU-driven graphics and simple, piezoelectric sound made the Apple ][ easier for people to develop for, the software tended to be less buggy and if the software tweaks were done right, other platforms had trouble keeping up (look at Karateka, so example).

[JamesD]

Back in the day, my complaints were the obvious ones you might expect from a teenager... things that every other computer on the market had that we didn't, such as an actual graphics chip (w/animated hardware sprites & MOBs, collision detection, hardware scrolling, etc.), a sound chip...

 

...but...

 

In retrospect, I think we did fine without those things. Just having CPU-driven graphics and simple, piezoelectric sound made the Apple ][ easier for people to develop for, the software tended to be less buggy and if the software tweaks were done right, other platforms had trouble keeping up (look at Karateka, so example).

Actually, software sprites, collision detection, and 1 bit sound are more difficult.

Perhaps it just made for better programmers, or games that focused less on doo dads than gameplay.

 

I ran across my C64 in a joystick (yay! Didn't burn!) the other day and played a bunch of games.

The games have a lot of color, better sound, etc... but the gameplay isn't any better than the games I play on the Apple II.

Frankly, I like most of the Apple games better... but I'm sure that joystick doesn't have the best of what's out there for the C64 and I it's one platform I don't mess with much.

[First Spear]

Just to keep my vote in this... If Apple had added AY-3-891x board in Slot 4 way back, in the pre-mouse days, that would have been enough for me. Just like Slots 1-3 and 6 were "standardized" after a few years in the ][ lifetime, if 4 had some kind of default sound card that would have been awesome.

[MarkO]

Just to keep my vote in this... If Apple had added AY-3-891x board in Slot 4 way back, in the pre-mouse days, that would have been enough for me. Just like Slots 1-3 and 6 were "standardized" after a few years in the ][ lifetime, if 4 had some kind of default sound card that would have been awesome.

I know that the Echo ][ Speech Synthesizer will work in Slot #3 while an 80 Column Card is in the Aux Slot on an NTSC ][e..

 

I have not tried the Echo + or Mocking Board in Slot #3, but since Slot #3 has limited usability in the ][e, that might "have been" be a good "standard"...

 

MarkO

Edited November 10, 2016 by MarkO

[Muzz73]

Yikes... I had no idea! My friends always thought that the Apple ][ was easy to program for and since I don't know anything about it, I just took them at their word.

 

I've always thought that Karateka, Choplifter and a few others were smoothest and least quirky on the Apple ][ (as compared to other 8-bit platforms). I guess it's just genius programmers, then!

[classicgamer_27330]

music in applesoft basic. I want to write a program that will play simple octave scales like the logo language could