Re: Apple II weather display

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

On Apr 18, 2:22 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
> BLuRry wrote:
> > On Apr 18, 8:29 am, Osgeld <osg...@cheesefactory.us> wrote:
>
> >>Another ghetto fab apple II graphics project my me. It downloads
> >>information from weather underground's mobile site and processes it
> >>for display on a II
>
> >>pt 1 of 3http://hackaday.com/2011/04/18/apple-ii-weather-display-part-1/
>
> > Awesome stuff!  You can probably get a higher baud rate though, just
> > not from Basic.  If you want to make a high-speed v2 of it, I don't
> > mind if you borrow the routines from AGS.  It has all the graphics
> > conversion, bootstrap, and high-speed (with compression) communication
> > writing for both the apple and PC/Mac side.  So all you'd have to do
> > is convert the web download part to Java. (but that's pretty
> > straightforward)
>
> I'm quite sure that communication speed is not the issue here.
>
> It's the BASIC used to do the graphics updates.
>
> The slow drawing of the block fonts is a dead giveaway.  Using shape
> tables for the characters and DRAW or XDRAW would speed the program
> up very significantly (as would using any block animation routines,
> but let's keep in in BASIC ;-).
>
> -michael
>
> NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
> Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/
>
> "The wastebasket is our most important design
> tool--and it's seriously underused."

Hmmm... looked like there was a beagle compiler copyright notice in
there.  Putting that aside, maybe using something more graphically-
oriented like Apex would be faster.  I remember that being pretty
decent for graphics rendering and also pretty easy to pick up.

-B