Michael J. Mahon wrote:
And why is that a problem?Speed, since it requires a 6502 "proxy" and a handshake to access Apple II memory locations, for text, graphics, or memory-mapped I/O. The Apple II architecture is designed to be controlled by accesses to memory addresses, sometimes precisely timed. Interposing interprocessor communication has serious speed effects when Apple II state must be changed.
All I can tell you is that I never found things slow with an Applicard. I was doing a lot of software development on such a system and assemble + link operations were at least 4x faster than on a Softcard.