Re: WHY does the apple II have higher resolution horizontally?

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

I think it was more a matter of what Woz could do with the fewest parts.  He was working off of a 1mhz clock and had to make some sort of video scanner that could work with that clock, output proper NTSC and interleave with the CPU so they don't step on each other.  Given the result, it was an ingenious low-cost and simple design.  Sather's book covers it extremely well!  ;-)

I think that the horizontal resolution of the graphics mode was derived off of reusing the scanner circuits to loop through 40 bytes per line, and Woz figured out by adding a small extra set of TTL logic he could pull off a color hi-resolution mode.  The elegant simplicity is astounding but that's also why the memory is non-linear and has screen holes! :-)

-B

On Monday, August 20, 2012 9:57:48 AM UTC-5, (unknown) wrote:
> 280X192.  TV does the same too.  VGA, SVGA, etc.  Did the designers have higher resolution sight in the horizontal direction?
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> Rich