Re: Wall Defence game for Apple II

[vladitx <vladitx@nucleusys.com>]

On Apr 25, 12:51 am, sicklittlemonkey <nick.westg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 25, 6:25 am, "Bill Garber" <willy4...@garberstreet.com> wrote:
>
> > "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote in messaget4ydnXoSQamaqE7WnZ2dnUVZ_jadnZ2d@giganews.com">news:t4ydnXoSQamaqE7WnZ2dnUVZ_jadnZ2d@giganews.com...
> > > It's hard to tell what those strange-colored keys are, but, in any case, it's not an actual Apple computer--its keyboard is *very*
> > > non-standard.
>
> It's the Bulgarian Pravetz clone that AppleWin emulates, and what the
> author of the Wall Defence game grew up using.

Yep, Pravetz-82. That's why we're little bit uneasy with the left/
right arrows. ;-)

It is a direct clone of the Apple II+ with some hacked cyrillic. Why
there were no left/right arrows? Beats me, but at least got corrected
in later models.

> One of the keys is a Latin/Cyrillic toggle.

Cyrillic was just the lowercase latin. So these are simply Shift and
CapsLock.
AFAIR CapsLock also changes the number keys - not very comfortable.

> There are other differences: in the firmware ROMs and character ROMs;

The character ROM is hacked to replace lowercase latin with uppercase
cyrillic.
The only firmware ROM change that I remember is the "Apple ][" boot
message replaced,

> some softswitch differences for detecting Latin/Cyrillic status.

None that I know of.

> Also I suspect the video scanner might be different based on some debugging
> I did of a Bulgarian game.

It should be just the Apple II+ with Euro video timing - more blank
lines.


Nick - very good knowledge of some obscure machine you probably never
saw. ;-)

Cheers,
  -- Vlad