BLuRry wrote: <snip>
It takes quite a considerable amount of work to utilize the //e double-hires graphics page, and not many game developers were all that successful at it. Granted, there were a few good ones out there, such as Broderbund's Airheart, the Epyx conversion of Rad Warrior (In europe: Antirad) and a very small number of others.
I have always thought this had much to do with the timing of DHR relative to the popularity of the platform. Apple II's with double-hi-res did not constitute a large enough customer base for games to be really interesting until after 1986, and by then, there were other platforms with larger markets. Introducing a new feature late in a product's lifespan is an almost certain way to ensure that it will never be fully exploited. Another of my "favorite" examples of this is Appleworks versions after version 3. All these enhancements really did was please a small hardcore segment of users, and split the waning development (and user) community into three parts, each of subcritical mass. There are lots of times when "better" isn't better. Or, as we used to say, "Being standard is better than being better." Or look at the trail of better processors littering the road behind the x86! -michael Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it is seriously underused."