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Re: Wall Defence game for Apple II



Steve Nickolas wrote:
drHirudo wrote:
The Imko and the Pravetz-82 computers, which we had at school, did not
had left and right arrow keys, so I assumed that the older Apple II
models, of which the bulgarian computers were almost exact clones,
also lack these keys. I stand corrected.

These computers were the reason I knew about the Ctrl+H and Ctrl+U
keys combinations. On the other hand, the Pravetz-8C, which I had at
home, had all the direction keys, plus F1 and F2 and upper and lower
case letters (Latin and Cyrillic, switchable with hardware switch). F1
and F2 were mapped to the Joystick buttons 1 and 2 - very handy for
pinball games and games with lots of shooting, where a friend can help
you with the shooting by pressing F1 on the keyboard.

The Apple //e and later had the same functionality as your F1/F2 in Cmd/Opt
(or Open Apple/Solid Apple in earlier models).  Not having it on the ][+
frustrated me to no end since some programs make it impossible to reboot
without powering down!

Of course, the Ctl-Open Apple-Reset reboot was a new feature of the //e
ROM, and had no counterpart on the ][ or ][+.

A non-power-cycling reboot of the ][ or ][+ required a Reset to get into
the monitor or into BASIC, and doing a "s^P" or "PR#s".  Since a program
could block the Reset, there was often no easy alternative to power-
cycling--which was the intent of intercepting Reset:  to prevent the
examination or capture of the program code.

The Autostart ROM even clobbered bytes in each page of memory upon
Ctl-OA-Reset, for a similar copy-discouraging reason.

-michael

NadaNet 3.0 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
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