Re: Commodore 64 kills APPLE II

[Jeff Thomas <a2forever@usa.net>]

Stede Troisi 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.

Commodore 64, has better graphics and sound, it's primarily designed as a
gaming computer and was promoted as such, which is disadvantage if you have
more than a casual interest in non-gaming applications.

At the time, if you wanted a 50/50 mix of gaming and home/business
applications the Apple IIe and Radio Shack TRS-80 won hands down. IBM PCs
were simply too expensive to buy just for that purpose. Partly due to lack of
80-column support.

While, the Commodore 64 was cheap, most early systems shipped with the slower
operating cassette drives, where as Apple IIe (and other systems) had
reliable floppy disk drives as standard. Much later, they switched to include
them.

Having owned both systems, I always found the Commodore 64 disk drives to be
the least reliable and cumbersome, weighted a ton and took up alot of room
being nearly a metre long. In fact, if the drive was left on too long, it
could melt the disk!
Most of the later games, were very slow in loading, without a Fastloader
cartridge installed. But I must admit that when the C= 1541-II floppy disk
drive came along with the  external power pack, it was alot better.

In terms of user friendliness, the Apple IIe was by far the easiest. I never
liked having to turn the computer off completely to reset it or typing in the
correct loading syntax for booting a disk and/or running applications e.g..
Load "*",8,1 etc.

The beauty of the Apple II was it's open architecture, which eventually IBM
wanted to emulate with their PC in 1981, rather than a closed system. This
opened the realm to numerous expandability possibilities and hence, why the
Commodore 64 was so limited. It was possible to upgrade the Apple IIe to
something superior than standard Commodore 64 configuration, be it a sound
card or improved graphics card to additional memory.

Non-standard ports on Commodore 64 was another drawback - IMHO. I can't even
connect a null-modem cable or printer directly to it, without a special
adapter, which are not avialable from any hardware store and is now long
obsolete.