On Fri, 31 Aug 2012, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
Also, unless things were passed to the 6502 (and I really don't know the extent of that), much of those things were in the monitor, which made them so easy to use. If the Z80 started doing such things, someone would have to write the code, not difficult, but just another thing that had to be done.Since the Apple II was the only widely sold CP/M platform with game graphics capabilities, and since non-CP/M Apples were a much larger market, there was no incentive to develop graphical games for the Apple that depended on the Softcard. In addition, the 6502 was faster than the Softcard Z80.
One might wonder to what extent those things would have been used in the Apple II if the monitor wasn't there to deal with them. It was like a library of code already there.
In other small computers of that vintage, people would often try to make use of what was in the pretty much always Microsoft BASIC in ROM, lots in there that would mean not having to reinvent the wheel, yet often not useful because it wasn't intended a "library functions" so there'd be code that got in the way, or it wasn't a subroutine so there was no easy way to get back to your own code.
Michael