Re: Commodore 64 kills APPLE II

[Jeff Blakeney <CUTjblakeney@sentex.net>]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:15:37 GMT, "Stede Troisi"
<stede.troisi@verizon.net> wrote:

>Is it me or does the APPLE II's graphic and sounds stink compared to the
>lower priced C64? I was playing around with the AppleWin emulator and the
>graphics and sounds are terrible.

For the most part, the C64 has better graphics and sound than any of
the 8 bit Apple II models.

With respect to graphics, many IIe machines and all IIc and IIc+
machines had a double hi-res graphics mode that gave them a 560x192
monochrome mode and what amounts to a 140x192 16 colour mode.  These
were as good, if not a little better than the C64 which had some
pretty weird colour placement restrictions IIRC.  Also, all models of
the Apple II line had slots with the exception of the IIc and IIc+
which allowed third party graphics cards to be added.  There weren't
very many of them and they weren't wide spread by any stretch of the
imagination but these could be used to extend the graphics
capabilities of these machines.  For instance, putting Apple's Video
Overlay Card in a IIe gave that machine all the graphics modes that
are available on the IIgs (as well as an not very useful but still
possible 640x400 interlaced mode with 16 colours per scan line using
dithering or 4 solid colours per scan line).

With respect to sound, the C64 beats a stock 8 bit Apple II any day.
Again, with the slots (and even using other methods for the IIc and
IIc+) it was possible to add sound hardware to these machines.  The
SID chip in the C64 is limited to 3 voices (6 if you do a hardware mod
to your motherboard and piggy back a second SID chip which was usually
used to produce stereo sound) while that was the minimum number of
voices you could get with add-on hardware for the Apple II IIRC.

However, because these graphics and sound add-ons (with the exception
of double hi-res) weren't very widespread, very little software was
ever written to take advantage of them.  Even double hi-res wasn't
used as much as normal hi-res which is only 280x192 monochrome or
basically 140x192 with 6 colours.

Now, when it comes to the Apple IIgs, the C64 loses hands down.  The
IIgs' graphics was almost as good as the Amiga 500's (320x200 and
640x200 resolutions and up to 3200 colours on screen at once out of a
palette of 4096).  The sound was better than the Amiga 500's as the
IIgs has 16 voices as opposed to the Amiga's 4.

So to sum up, the C64 does have better graphics and sound than most 8
bit Apple IIs but has worse graphics and sound than the Apple IIgs.

-- 
 Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II University in the
                 Apple II Community on Syndicomm.com
 CUT the obvious from my address if you want to e-mail me