Re: What sort of Apple user are you?

[Linards Ticmanis <ticmanis@gmx.de>]

On 05/05/2011 02:40 PM, Steve Nickolas wrote:

> That's fine, my //e only has 128K and I think most models in actual use 
> were also 128K machines.

Those 1MB "slinky" RAM cards are nice for a small number of things that
natively "know" how to access it, such as Appleworks; and a small number
of multi-loader games which can be copied to a RAM disk and then can be
run from there, such as the last Infocom Games (Zork Zero, Shogun,
Journey, Arthur).

Otherwise few things can profit from any of the memory beyond 128KB.
Remember, the Apple II like most 8-bit architectures is confined to 64KB
of address space, any more than that is only accesible by bank switching
or other "dirty tricks". That's why the original Apple II allowed only
48KB of RAM on the mainboard; 48KB of RAM space, 12 KB of ROM space and
4KB of space reserved for "memory mapped I/O" total 64KB, exactly as
much as a 6502 CPU can address. As soon as Apple went beyond that, first
with the Language Card, then with //e Aux Memory, then with "slinky"
cards, bank switching came into play - and each of those three expansion
types used its own bank switching method, which software had to know
about to be able to use any of the RAM beyond 48KB.

-- 
Linards Ticmanis