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Re: Apple II DIY systems?

Raymond Wiker wrote:

Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> writes:



On Tue, 5 Apr 2011, Linards Ticmanis wrote:



On 04/05/2011 02:52 AM, N.N. Thayer wrote:


This ad, which Vectronic's Apple World dates as 1978, indicates that
the Apple II motherboard was once offered as a standalone product:

http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/ads/ads/appleii/introappleii2.jpg


Off topic: do those odd game paddles depicted in that ad really exist?
They look like one-dimensional joysticks, I've never seen any like these
in reality. Or are they mock-ups?



No, they were more like slider pots.

I don't know whether they ever came with the Apple II.  I thought there
was a period when that sort of thing was common.  I guess because of
ads like that one, and some article in Byte about making your own, or
maybe it was about a game and it included how to make your own.

I thought the idea was that you only needed up and down, because
the games hadn't advanced much.  The ad mentions "pong", and that game
came with similar controllers.  I'm sure "Breakout" used only one
dimension, and "Breakout" was considered an important demo for
the Apple II.



	The "Star Wars" game used two paddles; you had to use both hands
to keep the enemy fighters in your sights. There were also some later
games that did this, for example, "Rat and Dragon", which was an entrant
in a competition run by Byte magazine.


And I expect that a lot of folks wrote an "Etch-a-Sketch"-like drawing
program in BASIC as an early demo.  ;-)

I even had one that used one paddle to set the shape SCALE and the other
to set the ROTation--great fun in just a few lines of code!

-michael

NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
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