Heh I remember when I "upgraded" from my VIC-20 to my Apple //c, I was similarly annoyed at how terrible the BASIC editor was on the Apple. It's so terrible compared to the 1977 Commodore editor! I feel your pain and frankly I feel like I missed out on not having a C64 as a kid!! (Hindsight is 20:20) As for that line draw command, it's doing that two pixel thing because of how Apple color works. You need two pixels next to each other to have white when using artifact color. Otherwise one single pixel will be rendered as green or purple. (Or blue or magenta with the pixel shift enabled) That is why games displaying text on a graphics screen on the Apple II must use double pixel fonts in order to even be somewhat legible on a color screen. I'm not sure why your capture device isn't rendering the artifact color properly.... But the single pixel maze would be all purple and green and not look much like a maze if you hook up a real color CRT.
One thing you could do is make a text file on the apple and tell basic to exec the text file. If it was a basic program you could tell it to run it at the end etc. It was as if you were typing in the program. So you could just do: EXEC YOURTEXTFILE and it would enter each line as if you were typing in a new program. I used this a couple of times for some minor thing.
As someone who started computing on the Apple II series, all of your criticisms of Apple's editor are valid and justified. Luckily, you didn't try to SAVE the program only to discover that since you were on a IIc, you could not only NOT use the disk][ (because you didn't load DOS or ProDOS), but there's not even a cassette available. You'd have had to have a serial connection... The II+ and later had "auto-start" ROM, which looked for a disk][ (or a device that looked like a "disk") and would try booting if it found one. Anything before IIc would just spin the disk forever until you Ctrl-Reset. (Reset by itself worked on early Apple IIs, but Apple added Ctrl when it was discovered that users would accidentally hit Reset. Older IIs had no RESB circuit, so to even get a prompt, you HAD to hit Reset after turning the machine on just to assert RESB on the CPU. IN on Apple II is $200. 256 bytes. (IN on C64 ends at like $259, I think...) Monitor will beep speaker if IN is within 8 chars of being filled, and if you bust the input buffer, it "helpfully" CANCELS your input! Not helping is that you pick up all those spaces when you scroll over the program, and those spaces count on IN (really... FPBASIC should have skipped "pretty" printing on Apple for this reason if they really didn't want to use ROM space to give us a decent editor.) Lucky for you that you had a IIc. Its escape handling used the arrow keys or IJKM (as well as the old ABCD from the original Apple II). On the original non-autostart ROM, you not only had to use (and remember which direction!) ABCD for movement, I think Escape didn't latch like on the IIe or later, so you have to press Escape for EACH cursor movement! Even in the updated escape handling, it was still objectively poor. Back in the day, programs like GPLE were used to get a screen editor that wasn't frustrating. Or you could type the program into Appleworks or AppleWriter, but then you'd have to EXEC the thing back in just to run it. Woz definitely was using NTSC tricks for both hires and getting color out of the Apple II. This is why modern equipment bugs out on that "NTSC" signal (TVs back then were like "close enough", but today, it could go blue-screen for any old reason). Woz definitely had to make engineering tradeoffs to avoid requiring a monitor in 1977 as opposed to just using a TV set.
Funny that the 1977 PET had none of those problems. Also worth noting that the "color killer circuit" was added as an "upgrade" since the color video was so bad. In college we got updated monitors for the //e's (RGB maybe) that also included a button to disable color on the monitor too. Wow, what high technology! Then some things would indeed be crisper and no color fringing, but graphics also became weirdly dotted due to the insane way Wozniak implemented color. And let's not forget the insane screen addressing. Non linear in all modes. And there are address "holes".
I remember in school where we had Apple IIs, the teacher gave us one of these extra-long one-line programs to type in, but he mentioned the problem about the extra space causing it to overflow if you tried to edit the program. The solution is to type POKE 33,33 which disables it from adding the extra spaces at the beginning and end of each line of text in the listing, which count against the line length limit if you cursor over them while editing the program. It will still add extra spaces within the program statements, though. So if your one-line program is too long to re-enter it with those included, the only solution is to type it in again!
@@8_Bit What it actually does is set the text window to 33 columns instead of 40, which is the point at which Applesoft stops adding blank space to the lines (at 34 columns wide, it still would). In 80-column mode, POKE 33,72 has the same effect. Type TEXT to return to normal text window width.
@@8_Bit Upon seeing the two of you conversing, I just want to take the opportunity to admit that for an embarrassingly long time, I thought the two of you were the same guy, just with two channels for two different kinds of topics
@@TheGreatAtario Funny! It's true that VWestlife's channel (and style) was a big influence on me getting into RUclips. He's been at it way longer than me.
Fans of this channel already know this, but I'd like to take a second to appreciate the professional titles of these videos. Some kid, or a lesser RUclipsr, would have titled this video something like "Robin DESTROYS Apple" and the thumbnail would have been him holding his arms in an X while looking angry. And I've never figured out why whenever a video is something like "Seven Reasons why blah blah" the thumbnail is almost always the person holding up 7 fingers, or whatever. Anyway, the professionalism of Robin's videos is appreciated.
@@8_Bit This comment resurfaced an old textbook memory and made me dig into the archives... In the Melbourne House book "Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner", from page 18 they start describing the concept of hexadecimal using a hand with 8 fingers! The diagrams of the 8-fingered-mutant-hand holding up various fingers to denote values is hilarious.
The one big error Woz made when defining the "OS" for the Apple II was to document the monitor and the basic down to the call addresses of the different functions. These functions calls would then make modifying the system absolutely impossible as 3rd party software would not work any more if one of these function would have moved even a bit. Commodore was wiser to put most fundamental API function in a jump table at the end of the ROM. That way thay could modify the postions of the ROM routines and needed just to adjust the entry in the table. Applications would not need to be modified.
This assumes application vendors played nicely. Even if Woz hadn't documented anything, the applications had a bad habit of using odd entry points. I've had to reinsert functionality that was in the monitor because VTech had just stubbed out monitor routines with RTS to make software "compatible" with LASER 128 I understand Woz had ROM restraints, but I think at least $D8 page (or at least somewhere on the 2k at $D000) should have been a jump table. It would have required extra ROM, but I'm sure Rick Auricchio would have appreciated this when he had to preserve all the entry points from the older ROMs when he wrote some of the IIe ROM.
The Atari 8-bit OS also uses OS vector tables & if software developers followed compatibility rules, then Atari Translator boot disks [or The FixXL] wouldn't have been necessary. But game designers think jumping directly to the OS routines saves milliseconds rather than use the proper vectors & software authors did this.
What is being _completely_ ignored here is 1. the *HIGH PRICE and LACK of AVAILABILITY of RAM and ROM chips* in the 1970s. The Apple 1 was *originally* sold with *4K RAM.* Yes, 4096 _bytes._ People couldn't afford 48 KB or even 64 KB RAM (ha!) for a long time. By the time the Apple 2 was ramping up having 48 KB was common. The Language Card solved two problems: How to allow people to use the older Integer Basic AND provide 16 KB more of RAM. Even Microsoft sold a 16 KB Language Card! 2. Woz didn't have the luxury of using "bloated" (JUMP) tables because his ROM chips were packed with functionality. Yes, jump tables are cleaner but Apple didn't have the luxury of perfect code -- they *shipped good enough.*
Regarding your closing remarks: I am very glad you chose that particular style for your videos, regardless of whether that's inspired by someone or your very own idea. I find your videos perfect they way they are and hope you won't ever change much about them.
Some of the weirdness of how the keys worked on an Apple //c (and //e) comes from the fact that the original Apple II only had left and right arrow keys, and no delete key. Also, the cursor flashed whatever character was underneath, so you never lost sight of it like in the //e and //c. You’d think Apple would have updated the ROM on the //e and //c to make better use of the additional keys, but nope!
Yeah, they kept compatibility with the older stuff at the expense of improvement. I think a lot of this was due to their inroads into the educational market. They wanted schools to buy their new machines and be able to still use the same software library, so this was the compromise.
One thing to note - although he is using an Apple IIc, the editor was written for the Apple II, which did not actually have a 'delete' key- nor a standardised keyboard for that matter. There were no lower case characters and various symbols were placed on regular keys to be accessed with the shift; I specifically remember @ being the shift-P.
To be totally fair, the II is just a much better small business computer and small businesses rarely are writing their own basic software to do the things they want to do with the computer. They buy off the shelf software. The II is just a vastly better computer for the small business user and probably education as well. Let's also be fair that there is 5 years difference between an Apple II and a C64. The C64 basic is horrible in its own right. It might have a better editor, but it is terrible.
I started on a Apple II in high school. When I got a C64 it was like a breath of fresh air. lol I'm also amazed at the condescending attitude of all those who are willing to constantly pay the "apple tax" because its "better" but they cant give any tangible reasons why. To each their own I guess.
Around 1988, after I had begged my Mom for a C64 for years, and my teachers had told her I had a gift for computing, she toiled, scrimped and saved, and in 1988, I cam home to see a full Apple //c setup with green monitor.. for me! I had to try so hard to contain my disappointment.. she had spent $1295 on this thing, so it had to be better than that $399 "toy" C64.. right? :''( So I dug in on the Apple.. BBSed on the apple, coded on it, made pixel art in Dazzle Draw, and lamented the poor gaming experience... for years. Until I was old enough to buy a well-used Amiga 500 of my own!
You should have told your mom that the Apple was an insult in 1983 and was insanity in 1988 when the same money could have gotten you a nice C128 or Amiga system.
Great video Robin, just confirmed I made the correct choice 40 years ago and loved my 64. Besides all my friends had C64's and we were pleased that our high school was a commodore user as well.
34:23 AppleWin developer here. I know a little about NTSC. Some _monitors_ are "finicky" with the NTSC video signal. A more expensive monitor tends to be better at "image stabilization." It could also be your capture device is not correctly focusing? The way color worked on the Apple 2 was *each byte effectively had a high-bit palette flag* that: 1) used blue/orange instead of green/magenta. 2) shifted those 7 bits over *half a pixel*.
When Apple licensed BASIC from Microsoft they added Hi-Res Graphics extensions to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the hardware. Applesoft has 8 color BUT there were 2 whites and 2 blacks leaving only 6. Color 0 has the high bit off. Color 4 has the high bit on.
The problem isn't the capture card. It's that Apple's NTSC signal is technically illegal. That is, so bad, it was against FCC rules to transmit it without special processing to fix it. It was barely NTSC compatible. Many modern monitors that claim to be NTSC compatible were designed by younger people who only have the specs, but no experience with actual NTSC devices. Which is why many of their designs won't accept Apple II series NTSC- they are far more literal about the rules than engineers of the 70's and 80's. Anything not within the NTSC spec does not get dsplayed. Which is probably why those HDMI solutions are so popular with Apple people. Only way to get monitors to accept the video.
The line drawing is not a bug. I think your capture device is somehow removing the color from the pixels, but to produce white on an Apple II you have to have two pixels side by side. Single pixels are suppose to come out in a different colour. This “artifact colour” is a quirk of the Apple II. To draw a green line, for instance, you’ll see the line appears “dotted” because you have to plot every second pixel on a line, to avoid it turning white.
Agreed. I suspect some kind of sharpening filter on the capture device. Text from the Apple II never looked so perfectly black-and-white as the capture in this video shows. The filter occasionally deactivates momentarily showing the original artifact color output. Maybe that’s the cause of the intermittent blurring of graphics mode as well.
At first I thought Applesoft's implementation of line drawing used a Bresenham-like algorithm but without allowing diagonal moves, hence the "thick" lines. But of course they couldn't be that naive. Your explanation makes much more sense.
@@pistolpablo1497The color burst signal is killed when the Apple is in pure text mode. In mixed mode (HiRes + 4 lines of text) the PAL model also killed the color burst signal for nice black and white text.
The obvious answer to easy editing is to have each command on its own line, but I wonder if there's a speed benefit to writing everything into one line of code? I fondly recall the 1- and 2 liner code demos on my apple 2 -- amazed by what could be accomplished with such tight code. I certainly learned a lot from them. :)
You can further reduce the size by just using HGR. Also you were getting ILLEGAL QUANTITY ERROR because the screen size is 280x192 meaning 0 is a pixel location therefore you can only go up to 279 for X, you got it correct by using 191 for Y. Now you can further reduce it by eliminating -S before the step token in both X and Y for loops.
HGR has one major diff from HGR2: HGR2 was used because it selects page 2 of hires, and it clears MIXSET (so you only see hires page; no text). HGR sets MIXSET by default, so you get 4 lines of text and the bottom of hires is hidden.
Lol. I started my computer life on an Apple II, moving to a IIe. I loved it then, but moved to a C64 which was awesome. IMO, C64 was waayyyy better than an Apple. Speaking of the way that your Apple user friends and relatives used to dismiss anything that wasn't Apple, I think that hasn't changed in 2024.
The Commodore should have been "way better." It's design was 5 years newer than the Apple 2, and had custom chips for such things as graphics and sound. The Apple 2 was ahead of its time in 1977, but by 1982 graphics and sound technology for 8 bit computers had advanced tremendously, and Apple COULDN'T simply upgrade to the new technology without abandoning the existing platform. Later upgrades such as 80 column cards and double hi-res graphics were as far as you could go without changing the entire format of the graphics system and breaking compatibility.
@@michaelwilliamson1392Cool theory bro. So explain why 1976 PET prototype (released in Jan 1977 as part of the trinity) was so much better than Apples. The Vic-20 was better. As were the Atari 8 bits. I am not saying they bested Apple 8bitters in every way, but yeah, overall better. You claim you had reached a kind of evolutionary dead end by the C64-- what happened to that vaunted "expandability "? And how do you explain the /// and the IIGS? They advanced without losing much compatibility.
Editing a line would drive me crazy. I moved from a Vic 20 to an Amstrad CPC 464 and that was wierd. It had a similar operation but implemented in a much better way. You moved a copy cursor up to the line you want to edit, but your real cursor remained in place. You then press the copy key and it copies what is under the copy cursor to the real cursor. This ended up being really powerful as you could copy parts from many places on the screen to make your new line. So to edit one value like you were attempting there, you'd move the copy cursor up, hit copy key a bunch of times constructing a version of the characters at the real cursor, then at the point you want a new value, just type it in, move the copy cursor past the old value, then continue pressing copy to copy the rest of the line.
We had a TI-99 4/A and a series of Atari computers while growing up (400, 1200XL, 65XE), and like most American kids, used Apple IIs at school. As a kid, I definitely thought the Atari was the better machine. 256 colors, player missile graphics, decent audio. I didn’t understand why the schools bought the Apples. But as I grew older, I learned to appreciate the things Apple brought to the table. Those expansion slots were definitely under appreciated by my younger self. But it was a huge difference. And while I could tell that the Atari floppy drive was slower than the Apple II drives, I only understood why after digging deeper into what Woz did. The thing is that both the Atari 8-but and Apple II machines were amazing. I’m glad that I was able to grow up at a time where home computers were interesting. Even though I never had a commodore, I would gladly take the opportunity to play around with one today. Even though these machines are less capable than the smart phones we had years ago, they just bring so much joy when playing with them these days. And they keep getting better too.
A mac does have the equivalent of a backspace key, but it's called delete. It doesn't have the equivalent of what's called delete on a windows computer, although you can do the same with fn-delete. Not as convenient though.
My Mac keyboard (wired USB) has two delete keys. The one at the top right of the main QWERTY cluster functions like a backspace. This is actually the same as the Commodore 64 and most Commodore machines. Then there's a delete key above the inverted T cursor keys, with a symbol pointing right beside it, which works like a PC keyboard delete key.
To me that Apple II aesthetics remember a sort of medical device, it would fit very well in hospitals and clinics (same for the Macs, always remembered me hospital/medical devices to me, on an aesthetics point of view). The C64 brown aesthetics feel more like a wooden piece of fornitures so it fits better in a living room or in a bedroom. Regarding 16 bits, Amiga 500 has some sort of star wars X-wing aesthetics feeling to me, custom chips, multitasking, even a single A500 with 512k was super powerful and could serve a lot of things, the Atari ST was a cheap and bare bones 68000 computer, with its diagonal lines and strange colour tone it was more like a dirt cheap and fragile Tie Fighter. BTW now you could do the same in c128 Basic using draw command (draw color, x, y) Edit: just continuing on aesthetics: Commodore Pets with their black keys and plain white cases, scream 2001 A Space Odissey from every pore, same perhaps with the Vic20 (or perhaps Vic20 is more Buck Rogers in 25th Century, somewhat) Returning to X-Wing vs Tie Fighter comparison, it could be applied also to C64D,C128 vs Spectrum, Plus4 and C16
Haha, I felt almost telepathic for a second! When you said "size of, uh..." over here I jumped to it and filled in saying "16?" and then you said just one number higher, haha!
As a C64 owner, I once had the "joy" of writing a bunch of Apple ][ code for a High School teacher. My experience was just as bad as what I see you having here. Once I was done, I was absolutely sure I had made the correct choice in purchasing my C64.
I enjoyed the B-roll (beaver roll?). I'm glad I learnt BASIC on the C64 with its abbreviations and easier editing! As you were trying it out, I did wonder if changing the size would give you a faster output - 7/8 would be much closer to the original C64 PRINT 10 anyway. The penultimate version of the edited program was over 6 lines/240 characters - so assuming a 255-byte input buffer that could explain the issue you were having. I'm not going to suggest rewriting the credits program in Applesoft BASIC - it's not worth your frustration!
I LOVE that Canadians roll with the stereotype. Makes them loveable. And Beavers are way cool animals. Get to know some, you will not regret it. They like sweet potatoes.
I always found Apples to be awkward to use, still do! You are not wrong, I started on a pet 2001, I was spoilt from day one with on screen editing. No other home computer ever improved upon that, I would think...why didn't they do it like the pet!!!
Uhh, this Apple editor is really a pain in the a**. I now like my C64 editor much more. Thank you. 😊 And about your journey, I like your videos and the way you present very much. Please keep it. 😊
When I took Applesoft BASIC in H.S., I'm pretty sure we never messed with editing like that - we limited the number of commands on a single program line and then retyping it wasn't such a chore. Of course, the only other programming I did back then was on a terminal to the local University's VAX for Pascal or APL, so I didn't have anything better to compare it to.
I was pretty shocked when I learned, after buying a special Apple II sound card to hear the music in the recent Nox Archaist RPG, that the music had to stop playing every time the disk was accessed as it couldn't do both together. Never mind the blurry artifact-driven graphics (especially the text which I barely find readable). The game is still an amazing achievement, but the hardware sure does hold it back.
@@saganandroid4175 Woz certainly knew about interrupts. Clearly they were not necessary for the initial computer as it was designed for the constraints imposed by Jobs. Later variants of the Apple II line did have interrupts and the implementations were different. This appears to mostly be to support the mouse first added with the Apple Iic and the Apple IIe through an I/O card.
@@RetroPaul6502 depends on when. The history states the Apple ll family lacked interrupt generation because Wozniak didn't understand what they were or how they might be useful. Keep in mind this is the genius who could not get his own Apple l running and Chuck Peddle was nice/foolish enough to come to his workshop garage and show him where his mistake was. Only much later, did Wozniak start to grasp to huge benefit of interrupt generators and supporting them. But his hardware design really wasn't a great fit. Contrast to other 6502 systems that included VIA/PIA/CIA chip as integral to their design. Not a hacked in afterthought. Not something slapped on a card that almost nothing supported. Integrated. The OS made us of the 6520, 6522 or 6526 depending on the era of the 6502 machine. The irony is that Commodore, who owned MOS, could not seem to avoid bugs in those chips.
@@saganandroid4175 The Apple 2 came out the same year that Space Invaders came out so didn't foresee arcade games and was not aimed at games. What it did have that the PET and TRS-80 didn't have were colour and hi-res graphics. Both were very quirky but they had them. By the time the C64 came out arcade games had exploded in capabilities and the C64 was aimed at games. The true innovator in this space was Atari because the same company that made the Atari 400 and 800 had also been making arcade games.
I was born 1979.. Each of my friends had a different computer. C64, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, IBM PC (yes, nearly all my friends households had a computer... I know how to pick 'em I guess). We had a TRS-80 model I (already outdated) but we made the quantum leap to an A500. I can't remember ever being talked to in a condescending way, or doing that to my friends though! I had every right to because the Amiga kicked those C64, MSX, IBM PC and ZX Spectrums asses! ;). It was a fun period in home computing with so many different types of computer. Eventually everyone got either an IBM compatible or an Amiga in the early 90ies. I went to a local computer user every month, and there were IBM compatible users and Amiga users. I do remember IBM compatible owners there talking down the Amiga a lot... At first they had no real ammo, but as we neared 1994 they did... Bought a PC soon after, kept the Amiga, sold the Amiga, sold the PC and bought a Mac early 2000, and in recent year bought back 5 Amiga's ;)
Don't forget the Amstrad CPC... I was the "odd kid" with an Apple IIc... all my friends had Amstrads, very few had Apple II-s. Commodore was not that hyped in France... we had Thomson TO7, Thomson MO5 (the French BBC micro :D), etc
@@The-Weekend-Warrior I was (still am) in The Netherlands. Never saw an Amstrad or even Apples, they were very uncommon over here probably. Interesting how the type of computer people had was determined by the region they lived in.
Sounds familiar. Except the C64 was pretty dominant. One late bloomer had a C128, one had an Atari ST, and I was the PC guy with an 8088 XT (also from Atari, by the way). I remember when a friend's parents later got a Mac; only black and white, but the crisp text and easy to use interface just blew my mind (and it ejected floppy disks in software, how cool was that?) But Amiga was never a big deal for us, most people migrated straight to PC, because even if it was not as colorful and had limited audio capabilities, it just had more RAM, more CPU power and the more interesting software. Sure, the Amiga had way better games, but those who were into games would rather get a console (and here we had the good old Nintendo vs. Sega war). I continued to use PCs until I started working at a company where all the desktop computers were Macs and I discovered that MacOS X was a pretty decent operating system. That's when I bought a Mac as my main work computer at home and kept my PC only for gaming, until I gave up on PCs altogether because for my causal gaming a Mac or even a tablet would do.
For the user experience everything so so much better on C64. It was very painful to watch You go over the lines over and over again :) You made that sacrifice so we don't have to :) Great video! Cheers!
You always do a great job, and I love your videos. BTW, I get a bit of a kick when you make a mistake, or when things are not going well, and you do that little 'Oh....' sound. I've heard it so many times that it will make me smile when you do it, and on this video, you really gave us a great one. Normally I smile a bit when you do, but that one you did on this video made me actually laugh out loud! Keep up the good work and keep chugging along. Your fan base will be there for you.
The Apple II never ceases to amaze me. If you've ever tried doing graphics routines in assembly on it you'd know how insane the video memory addressing is (in high res mode anyway.) Yet you can easily get BASIC to calculate sine waves on a machine that has no floating point CPU
Some people in here saying that apple had a terrible editor. It did not have one at all. Do you want it to change a semicolon or edit some text, you had to re-enter the entire line
When I was a kid in the '80s I would hang around computer stores and I would try the Apple IIs, now I know why I never "got it". The staff weren't inclined to help a kid with no money I guess.
The Apple IIc startup is quite user friendly for people not so familiar with computers: most people want to boot up a program from a disk (or at least get to the point where then can run one), and if you forget to close the drive door the system makes it clear that something's gone wrong. This comes at the cost of making it slightly more difficult new users wanting to start up _without_ DOS loaded, but that's a pretty small segment of the user population. The rest of your comments about the Apple II's problems are pretty much fair, though it's worth remembering that this is one of the very first consumer computers ever (and the first with a composite colour display and relatively high resolution graphics), and a machine whose design predates the Commodore 64 by five years. Commodore more or less invented the microcomputer BASIC screen editor in 1977 but released the PET months after the Apple II was released, so unlike other companies Apple wasn't in a position to learn from that. (I suppose Apple could have improved their screen editor along with the release of Applesoft BASIC, but it's also fair to consider that perhaps they didn't want to deal with the BIOS compatibility issues that might bring.) That weird fading you're seeing in your capture is due to issues with where the capture device is sampling the signal and how it's interpreting colour. (Colour and small pixels--more than about 150 to 200 across, aren't actually distinguishable in NTSC.) If you want a nice solid image, try a monochrome capture (one that actually reads it as a black-and-white signal, not one that reads colour and converts). Or just use a monochrome monitor.
The sound of the Apple floppy drives still brings back happy memories of typing in programs from Nibble magazine, and playing Lode Runner, Choplifter, and Ultima 3! 😅
Actually you *can* insert text. The trick is to cursor right over the initial text as you've done so far. But when you reach the point where you want to add anything, hit Escape, then move the cursor somewhere else on the screen (above, below, doesn't matter.) At this point hit the space bar to exit Escape mode, type what you want, then hit Escape again. Move the cursor back to where you were in the code, hit the space bar to exit Escape mode, cursor right over everything else.
@@granitepenguin It was just something I figured out as a kid back in the 80s on an Apple ][e once I realized the way the forward and backward buffer worked. This also allows deletion by escaping forward over unneeded text.
12:57 The spaces are added only in front and at the end of a token. Tokens are the BASIC keywords and the operators +,-,*,/,^. No space s are added at punctuations :,()[] and names (variable, functions). It is a very simple scheme and very consistent. It is annoyingly simple. What's even more annoying is that it adds 4 spaces on each line break if the window size id wider than 33 characters. This adds so many blanks that a BASIC line might exceed the size of the input buffer (255 bytes) and it adds these blanks even if the line break hapeen inside a string litteral. So if you copy to the buffer with -> you will add these lanks into the litteral. Solution POKE33,33 to reduce the width of the input window so that LIST does not add these blanks.
We used to have a beaver on the back 80 of our farm. He built a huge lodge. Look just like you would see in the movies etc. all the tree stumps looked like they were chopped down with a hatchet.
44:45 - It's 2024, where is our super advanced version of Smell-O-Vision? I want that burning electronics smell when a RIFA capacitor explodes, gosh darn it! Also, I feel so spoiled thanks to the Commodore screen editor. #ThankYouCommodoreEngineers
I was white knuckle afraid the whole time seeing so many things stuffed into a single line. New line numbers for almost everything here. Maybe two variables assigned together, or two print statements if I intended a double space. That way when (not if) I made a mistake it was easier to retype the offending line. I knew about the escape and cursor thing but I retyped anyway to be sure.
I grew up with a used ][+ swapped to a Laser 128 not long after. This was a super common frustration. It was easier to ditch and retype the line at that point, and avoid long lines in the first place. :P
Great video. I had a IIc back when they were new and I currently have one, but not the same one. I'm still looking for a Koala pad w/software for it. Thanks for all your work you put into your videos. You are one of the best.
@@saganandroid4175 Floppies at the time were only 140k. The early Apple DOS couldn't even create text files or "cat" text files. One would need to have a utility for that. Text editors were also a frustrating issue back in the day, but there was less of a need for that since BASIC was tokenized and the assembly editors also "compressed" the text files with tabs. The lack of text file support is interesting since Apple DOS has an "exec" filetype that is similar to a Windows .bat file. It was an interesting time since people had to come up with solutions that carried forth to today.
That glitching looks like compression artifacts from your capture device. The Apple //c's video could be a contributing cause. Your Apple //c is probably working correctly. The video output from the Apple II series can jitter at times, and while the Apple //c is less prone to jittering than say the Apple ][ Plus, it can still do it. (This jittering may be more apparent now that we're using devices with digital input stages, compared to back in the day when we used analog CRTs.)
I found this video very fun. All your videos are. I love beavers too. I’m a PC guy. But my stepfather have been using a Mac since the late 80’s. I’ve been using iPhone since 2010 though. I’m watching this video on one
Best day was when I showed my Apple friends digitized music/speech on my 64. Hated Apple basic so much I refused to use it in the one and only computer class I took in HS, turned in my printouts in C64 basic, the teacher was not pleased. Apples back in the day were just like trying to use Macs with only one mouse button. Super annoying and unintuitive.
Well, this is why normally each statement would be on its own line, and if you numbered your lines by 10s there'd be room to add additional lines in between them. Still pretty neat for a computer designed in 1977.
The Apple II editor is aweful. I really don't hate Apple computers, but I do hate the media darling Apple is, and the rewriting of history to their benefit that is so common place.
Idiots in media always forget the superior PET, which beat the Apple.II to market. And they always neglect menti oning that Chuck Peddle saved Wozniak from his bad design. The naive fool.
The Apple computer of 1977 doesn't exist for the Apple computer of 2024 and the Apple II isn't a technology Apple has any interest in. Apple computer pretty much torpedoed the Apple II line of computers in the mid 80s when the focus became Macintosh.
Also, one note: once I learned about EXEC I stopped using the applesoft editor and used instead ProTERM as my text editor text files, which made it a code -> run option that didn't suck. It wasn't ideal but it worked OK enough back then. We are so spoiled now! No disk swapping or rebooting to compile anything and run anything. Just instant.
@@saganandroid4175 Just be thankful for the variety of choices. If a TI-99 works well for you, great! The fact that they put other people down suggests that they aren't really happy with their choice, and they want to make you unhappy with yours: Misery loves company.
HPLOT can draw lines as well as plot points. e.g HPLOT x,y TO x1, y1 HPLOT has another variant HPLOT TO x,y that plots a line from the previous plotted point to specified point. you can significantly speed it up by plotting lines rather than points.
All those old machines worked differently with different quirks so there's nothing surprising for me. The base default was BASIC with a few OS-ish commands. Whether or not they had anything like an "editor" for BASIC, and if they did, how it works, varied all over the place. My first Commodore machine was the Amiga 1000. Before that I used earlier Apple 2s, TRS-80 Model 1 & Model 3, and original ZX Spectrum. Occasionally something rare and exotic, but never any PET, VIC-20, or C64.
I think the reason for the thick lines drawn by HPLOT is the "artifact" color that Apple used. Single pixel diagonal lines would appear as alternating colors on a real CRT. It looks like your capture device is interpreting the signal as monochrome, so it's not apparent here. Try your program with HCOLOR = 1 or 2 or 5 or 6 to see a real mess. HGR in color is really only 140 x 192.
Thank you for this great video where I discover how to edit a BASIC program on an Apple //. Accustomed since my childhood to using the full-page editor of the Commodore 8bits, I would have been unable to get by on this machine. But in fact, this program is not really a one-liner! On the other hand, this 10 PRINT in high resolution graphics mode actually did it on a Commodore C128D (international AZERTY version) because on the 80col display, it does not take up more than one line (a line 10): 10 GRAPHIC1:DO:CHAR1,40*RND(1),25*RND(1),CHR$(205+2*(RND(1)
The term "one-liner" generally refers to a single logical line of BASIC, that is, it only has one line number such as line 0, 1, or 10. This line limit is often 80, 120, or 256 characters in length depending on the version of BASIC, and that's why the many BASIC coding competitions usually have different categories matching those 3 values. One could decide on a physical single line limit, but it would vary very much from system to system: I have computers with 22, 32, 40, 64, and 80 column screens.
@@8_Bit Thank you, for all these excellent videos on a topic that means so much to me. As a teenager, I spent most of my time trying to program my C128-D in assembly language but without much success in understanding what was happening. Now, I have all the explanations about how it works. At the time, I didn't have the necessary documentation. No adult around me knew how to advise and guide me on the right path or show how to acquire the right manuals. I love following your videos; I find them very well explained and they provide answers to so many old questions that have long remained unresolved. P.S.: Concerning the "one-screen-liner", I was just kidding. My codes just take both two lines on the 40-col screen. :)
I sympathise with the editing - it's one of the few nicer features of the C64's OS and BASIC. the Acorn machines do not do full screen editing - but I think they're an improvement on the Apple - instead they have a copy key with duplicates whatever is under the cursor into the present input line - so to edit a line you copy it into the active line, then edit it there. Still a bit unwieldy but not actually confusing like this.
Have you ever used a BBC Micro? They have odd line editing, using a _copy_ key and the cursor keys to copy parts of code and modify it. At least with that, it’s possible to insert code.
I think Woz was used to using terminals or teleprinters, and he was stuck in the "I have to do it the old way" mentality. Either that, or Woz was so good that he always typed everything correctly the first time, so he saw no need for an editor.
43:58 The commodore demo at the end had thick lines in the maze (because they were characters and not drawn lines)... so it would be totally ok to use the hplot on the //c which produces a thick line as well....
As bad the the made-for-bad-TVs C64 font was, the Apple version looks vastly worse. It has a / but the other character\ is even worse. You get gaps between lines that are even worse. C= should have kept the PET or Vic20 font.
Heheh, I liked your segment about Jim and making your style of videoing yourself as somewhat of an homage to him. Also, cool that you released this on Independence Day here in the USA (though I understand if you really gave no thought of that, ha).
The confusing bit about the editing within Applesoft BASIC is that it involves two different modes -- input mode and cursor movement. The addition of spaces in listing can be a blessing and curse -- as you discovered, when you have program lines that are near the limit it's a curse (to work with these, you'll have to keep toggling between cursor move and edit mode). Inserting text could be handled by toggling to cursor move to move cursor elsewhere (possibly even text that you might want to copy), switch to enter mode to type or cursor past text you want to copy, then toggle to cursor move mode to position to continue, toggle back to enter mode to scan past the rest of the line. Blanks are ignored (unless part of a string constant or REM) -- so you can enter "P R I N T" and still end up with "PRINT" (assuming that there wasn't text prior to it that might affect the parser. This also meant you can't use space to indent code. It also means you can't use space to affect the parsing -- for example if you try to enter "IF A THEN PRINT A" you don't get the expected result -- you end up with "IF AT HEN PRINT A". To get the intended result you have to enter it as "IF(A)THEN PRINT A"
The editing quriks within Applesoft didn't bug me as much -- I came from a TRS-80 background where the editing was line-oriented (not too different from using EDLIN text editor on the IBM-PC) In comparison the editing method in Applesoft was more "user-friendly"
Yeah, I'm glad I grew up on Commodore instead of Apple as well, but right after we got our 128 in 87 or 88 as an upgrade from our 82 64, we also got our first Apple computer: a Mac SE. I still have all of these computers (and have finally set my 128 back up just the other day). Of course I don't use the old Mac much, and right now I'm typing on my self-assembled Aorus PC. My laptop computer would be a PC too but my dad gave me his laptop computer a few years ago and it happens to be a Mac, and I haven't felt like bothering to replace my Mac laptop computer with a --real computer, aghehhmm-- PC laptop computer.
a lot of the oddities comes from the original designs of the apple I and II by woz being woz in the 70's ... for the most part a program written for the apple II in 1977 would run on your brand new ][e platnium or //c in 1991. It took some serious nipple twisting back in the day to get my dad off the Apple II platform as he had over a decade of business data in appleworks and by the end of it I was in high school and basically shoving ram chips in our applied engineering card and got it maxed out with 2MB, quite a capable office suite machine, but yea games were the suck
When I first moved from my Commodore to a PC using DOS 2.11, I had to use the edlin editor. That is a line based editor and did not do full screen. That was a terrible surprise coming from the Commodore with all the time full screen editing. I bought a shareware (yes, I reallly paid for it) editor called QEDIT that gave me back full screen file editing. Still would have been nice to use up arrow on that version of DOS to get to previous commands. That came in a later DOS version as well as a reasonable EDIT utility. I think that was in DOS 3.3. But it's literally been decades so I'm not sure.
Apparently it wasn't until MS-DOS 5.0 that EDIT.exe appeared, in 1991 (according to the Wikipedia article)! I didn't get into MS-DOS computers until around then, so I missed all the EDLIN stuff fortunately.
Heh I remember when I "upgraded" from my VIC-20 to my Apple //c, I was similarly annoyed at how terrible the BASIC editor was on the Apple. It's so terrible compared to the 1977 Commodore editor! I feel your pain and frankly I feel like I missed out on not having a C64 as a kid!! (Hindsight is 20:20)
As for that line draw command, it's doing that two pixel thing because of how Apple color works. You need two pixels next to each other to have white when using artifact color. Otherwise one single pixel will be rendered as green or purple. (Or blue or magenta with the pixel shift enabled) That is why games displaying text on a graphics screen on the Apple II must use double pixel fonts in order to even be somewhat legible on a color screen. I'm not sure why your capture device isn't rendering the artifact color properly.... But the single pixel maze would be all purple and green and not look much like a maze if you hook up a real color CRT.
One thing you could do is make a text file on the apple and tell basic to exec the text file. If it was a basic program you could tell it to run it at the end etc. It was as if you were typing in the program.
So you could just do:
EXEC YOURTEXTFILE
and it would enter each line as if you were typing in a new program. I used this a couple of times for some minor thing.
As someone who started computing on the Apple II series, all of your criticisms of Apple's editor are valid and justified. Luckily, you didn't try to SAVE the program only to discover that since you were on a IIc, you could not only NOT use the disk][ (because you didn't load DOS or ProDOS), but there's not even a cassette available. You'd have had to have a serial connection...
The II+ and later had "auto-start" ROM, which looked for a disk][ (or a device that looked like a "disk") and would try booting if it found one. Anything before IIc would just spin the disk forever until you Ctrl-Reset. (Reset by itself worked on early Apple IIs, but Apple added Ctrl when it was discovered that users would accidentally hit Reset. Older IIs had no RESB circuit, so to even get a prompt, you HAD to hit Reset after turning the machine on just to assert RESB on the CPU.
IN on Apple II is $200. 256 bytes. (IN on C64 ends at like $259, I think...) Monitor will beep speaker if IN is within 8 chars of being filled, and if you bust the input buffer, it "helpfully" CANCELS your input! Not helping is that you pick up all those spaces when you scroll over the program, and those spaces count on IN (really... FPBASIC should have skipped "pretty" printing on Apple for this reason if they really didn't want to use ROM space to give us a decent editor.)
Lucky for you that you had a IIc. Its escape handling used the arrow keys or IJKM (as well as the old ABCD from the original Apple II). On the original non-autostart ROM, you not only had to use (and remember which direction!) ABCD for movement, I think Escape didn't latch like on the IIe or later, so you have to press Escape for EACH cursor movement! Even in the updated escape handling, it was still objectively poor. Back in the day, programs like GPLE were used to get a screen editor that wasn't frustrating. Or you could type the program into Appleworks or AppleWriter, but then you'd have to EXEC the thing back in just to run it.
Woz definitely was using NTSC tricks for both hires and getting color out of the Apple II. This is why modern equipment bugs out on that "NTSC" signal (TVs back then were like "close enough", but today, it could go blue-screen for any old reason). Woz definitely had to make engineering tradeoffs to avoid requiring a monitor in 1977 as opposed to just using a TV set.
Funny that the 1977 PET had none of those problems. Also worth noting that the "color killer circuit" was added as an "upgrade" since the color video was so bad. In college we got updated monitors for the //e's (RGB maybe) that also included a button to disable color on the monitor too. Wow, what high technology! Then some things would indeed be crisper and no color fringing, but graphics also became weirdly dotted due to the insane way Wozniak implemented color. And let's not forget the insane screen addressing. Non linear in all modes. And there are address "holes".
"Nice beaver!" "I just had it stuffed."
The naked gun movies all were classics!
... Strike?
@@vanhetgoor was thinking exactly the same
I remember in school where we had Apple IIs, the teacher gave us one of these extra-long one-line programs to type in, but he mentioned the problem about the extra space causing it to overflow if you tried to edit the program. The solution is to type POKE 33,33 which disables it from adding the extra spaces at the beginning and end of each line of text in the listing, which count against the line length limit if you cursor over them while editing the program. It will still add extra spaces within the program statements, though. So if your one-line program is too long to re-enter it with those included, the only solution is to type it in again!
I like how easy that POKE 33,33 is to remember!
@@8_Bit What it actually does is set the text window to 33 columns instead of 40, which is the point at which Applesoft stops adding blank space to the lines (at 34 columns wide, it still would). In 80-column mode, POKE 33,72 has the same effect. Type TEXT to return to normal text window width.
@@8_Bit Upon seeing the two of you conversing, I just want to take the opportunity to admit that for an embarrassingly long time, I thought the two of you were the same guy, just with two channels for two different kinds of topics
@@TheGreatAtario Two of who?
@@TheGreatAtario Funny! It's true that VWestlife's channel (and style) was a big influence on me getting into RUclips. He's been at it way longer than me.
I love your style of presentation, definitely captures the “Jim Butterfield” Bits and Bytes vibe.
Fans of this channel already know this, but I'd like to take a second to appreciate the professional titles of these videos. Some kid, or a lesser RUclipsr, would have titled this video something like "Robin DESTROYS Apple" and the thumbnail would have been him holding his arms in an X while looking angry. And I've never figured out why whenever a video is something like "Seven Reasons why blah blah" the thumbnail is almost always the person holding up 7 fingers, or whatever. Anyway, the professionalism of Robin's videos is appreciated.
For some reason I imagined one hand with 7 fingers, which sounds like something an AI-generated thumbnail would do :)
@@8_Bit Image how fast you could type a Basic program from the back of a magazine with 7 fingers on each hand. 😀
@@8_Bit This comment resurfaced an old textbook memory and made me dig into the archives... In the Melbourne House book "Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner", from page 18 they start describing the concept of hexadecimal using a hand with 8 fingers! The diagrams of the 8-fingered-mutant-hand holding up various fingers to denote values is hilarious.
@@mysticgreg I remember that too, I found I had tweeted about it back in 2022. It's bizarre! :)
@@8_Bit Ha I just saw your retweet of it now! Classic.
The one big error Woz made when defining the "OS" for the Apple II was to document the monitor and the basic down to the call addresses of the different functions. These functions calls would then make modifying the system absolutely impossible as 3rd party software would not work any more if one of these function would have moved even a bit. Commodore was wiser to put most fundamental API function in a jump table at the end of the ROM. That way thay could modify the postions of the ROM routines and needed just to adjust the entry in the table. Applications would not need to be modified.
This assumes application vendors played nicely. Even if Woz hadn't documented anything, the applications had a bad habit of using odd entry points. I've had to reinsert functionality that was in the monitor because VTech had just stubbed out monitor routines with RTS to make software "compatible" with LASER 128
I understand Woz had ROM restraints, but I think at least $D8 page (or at least somewhere on the 2k at $D000) should have been a jump table. It would have required extra ROM, but I'm sure Rick Auricchio would have appreciated this when he had to preserve all the entry points from the older ROMs when he wrote some of the IIe ROM.
The Atari 8-bit OS also uses OS vector tables & if software developers followed compatibility rules, then Atari Translator boot disks [or The FixXL] wouldn't have been necessary. But game designers think jumping directly to the OS routines saves milliseconds rather than use the proper vectors & software authors did this.
What is being _completely_ ignored here is
1. the *HIGH PRICE and LACK of AVAILABILITY of RAM and ROM chips* in the 1970s. The Apple 1 was *originally* sold with *4K RAM.* Yes, 4096 _bytes._ People couldn't afford 48 KB or even 64 KB RAM (ha!) for a long time. By the time the Apple 2 was ramping up having 48 KB was common. The Language Card solved two problems: How to allow people to use the older Integer Basic AND provide 16 KB more of RAM. Even Microsoft sold a 16 KB Language Card!
2. Woz didn't have the luxury of using "bloated" (JUMP) tables because his ROM chips were packed with functionality.
Yes, jump tables are cleaner but Apple didn't have the luxury of perfect code -- they *shipped good enough.*
@@MichaelPohoreskihow much memory did the first PET have?
@@infindebula The PET came with 4 KB or 8 KB.
Regarding your closing remarks: I am very glad you chose that particular style for your videos, regardless of whether that's inspired by someone or your very own idea. I find your videos perfect they way they are and hope you won't ever change much about them.
The beaver footage really shows the understatement of "Beavers cut down trees and build dams". There way more effort than is implied.
Some of the weirdness of how the keys worked on an Apple //c (and //e) comes from the fact that the original Apple II only had left and right arrow keys, and no delete key. Also, the cursor flashed whatever character was underneath, so you never lost sight of it like in the //e and //c. You’d think Apple would have updated the ROM on the //e and //c to make better use of the additional keys, but nope!
Yeah, they kept compatibility with the older stuff at the expense of improvement. I think a lot of this was due to their inroads into the educational market. They wanted schools to buy their new machines and be able to still use the same software library, so this was the compromise.
oOOOOoo looking forward to the comments on this one.
@25:32 Not sure we've ever heard you sigh in frustration before :D
Overrated IBMs and Apples can easily wear away the Canadian veneer of reserved, calm, cool.
I totally agree about the BASIC editor. It is terrible and I've been saying it since Junior High when I was forced to use it.
Atari 8-bit user here. 💯 agree.
Atari OS "E:" device FTW! 🎉
One thing to note - although he is using an Apple IIc, the editor was written for the Apple II, which did not actually have a 'delete' key- nor a standardised keyboard for that matter. There were no lower case characters and various symbols were placed on regular keys to be accessed with the shift; I specifically remember @ being the shift-P.
To be totally fair, the II is just a much better small business computer and small businesses rarely are writing their own basic software to do the things they want to do with the computer. They buy off the shelf software.
The II is just a vastly better computer for the small business user and probably education as well.
Let's also be fair that there is 5 years difference between an Apple II and a C64. The C64 basic is horrible in its own right. It might have a better editor, but it is terrible.
It's not just a Basic problem. The C= have the full screen editor always available.
@@tarstarkusz what made the II better for small business? The software availability? Apple Works?
I started on a Apple II in high school. When I got a C64 it was like a breath of fresh air. lol I'm also amazed at the condescending attitude of all those who are willing to constantly pay the "apple tax" because its "better" but they cant give any tangible reasons why. To each their own I guess.
I can feel your pain, Robin... thanks for powering through!
Around 1988, after I had begged my Mom for a C64 for years, and my teachers had told her I had a gift for computing, she toiled, scrimped and saved, and in 1988, I cam home to see a full Apple //c setup with green monitor.. for me! I had to try so hard to contain my disappointment.. she had spent $1295 on this thing, so it had to be better than that $399 "toy" C64.. right? :''( So I dug in on the Apple.. BBSed on the apple, coded on it, made pixel art in Dazzle Draw, and lamented the poor gaming experience... for years. Until I was old enough to buy a well-used Amiga 500 of my own!
Where were you such that a C64 cost 399 on 1988? That is closer to the price of a low end Amiga.
You should have told your mom that the Apple was an insult in 1983 and was insanity in 1988 when the same money could have gotten you a nice C128 or Amiga system.
Great video Robin, just confirmed I made the correct choice 40 years ago and loved my 64. Besides all my friends had C64's and we were pleased that our high school was a commodore user as well.
I was talking to my TV, "Robin, it is line number 12. Just type 12 ". LOL.
Me too! 😅
34:23 AppleWin developer here. I know a little about NTSC. Some _monitors_ are "finicky" with the NTSC video signal. A more expensive monitor tends to be better at "image stabilization." It could also be your capture device is not correctly focusing?
The way color worked on the Apple 2 was *each byte effectively had a high-bit palette flag* that:
1) used blue/orange instead of green/magenta.
2) shifted those 7 bits over *half a pixel*.
When Apple licensed BASIC from Microsoft they added Hi-Res Graphics extensions to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the hardware. Applesoft has 8 color BUT there were 2 whites and 2 blacks leaving only 6. Color 0 has the high bit off. Color 4 has the high bit on.
You can test this via this short program:
1 HGR:HCOLOR=0:HPLOT 0,0:HCOLOR=4:HPLOT 0,1
2 ? PEEK(8192):? PEEK(9216)
The problem isn't the capture card. It's that Apple's NTSC signal is technically illegal. That is, so bad, it was against FCC rules to transmit it without special processing to fix it. It was barely NTSC compatible. Many modern monitors that claim to be NTSC compatible were designed by younger people who only have the specs, but no experience with actual NTSC devices. Which is why many of their designs won't accept Apple II series NTSC- they are far more literal about the rules than engineers of the 70's and 80's. Anything not within the NTSC spec does not get dsplayed. Which is probably why those HDMI solutions are so popular with Apple people. Only way to get monitors to accept the video.
Robin: This is a big reason why I do my deep dive videos. I want people who have been off in one archipelago, to see the others. :)
The line drawing is not a bug. I think your capture device is somehow removing the color from the pixels, but to produce white on an Apple II you have to have two pixels side by side. Single pixels are suppose to come out in a different colour. This “artifact colour” is a quirk of the Apple II. To draw a green line, for instance, you’ll see the line appears “dotted” because you have to plot every second pixel on a line, to avoid it turning white.
Agreed. I suspect some kind of sharpening filter on the capture device. Text from the Apple II never looked so perfectly black-and-white as the capture in this video shows. The filter occasionally deactivates momentarily showing the original artifact color output. Maybe that’s the cause of the intermittent blurring of graphics mode as well.
At first I thought Applesoft's implementation of line drawing used a Bresenham-like algorithm but without allowing diagonal moves, hence the "thick" lines. But of course they couldn't be that naive. Your explanation makes much more sense.
@@pistolpablo1497The color burst signal is killed when the Apple is in pure text mode.
In mixed mode (HiRes + 4 lines of text) the PAL model also killed the color burst signal for nice black and white text.
The obvious answer to easy editing is to have each command on its own line, but I wonder if there's a speed benefit to writing everything into one line of code?
I fondly recall the 1- and 2 liner code demos on my apple 2 -- amazed by what could be accomplished with such tight code. I certainly learned a lot from them. :)
One liners are both smaller and faster. Not a lot mind you, but it's a skill that helps when cycles or RAM are few. It's also a coding aesthetic.
I met Jim and emailed with him a couple of times, I think you're definitely carrying the torch, Robin.
You can further reduce the size by just using HGR. Also you were getting ILLEGAL QUANTITY ERROR because the screen size is 280x192 meaning 0 is a pixel location therefore you can only go up to 279 for X, you got it correct by using 191 for Y. Now you can further reduce it by eliminating -S before the step token in both X and Y for loops.
HGR has one major diff from HGR2: HGR2 was used because it selects page 2 of hires, and it clears MIXSET (so you only see hires page; no text). HGR sets MIXSET by default, so you get 4 lines of text and the bottom of hires is hidden.
Lol. I started my computer life on an Apple II, moving to a IIe. I loved it then, but moved to a C64 which was awesome. IMO, C64 was waayyyy better than an Apple.
Speaking of the way that your Apple user friends and relatives used to dismiss anything that wasn't Apple, I think that hasn't changed in 2024.
lol
The Commodore should have been "way better." It's design was 5 years newer than the Apple 2, and had custom chips for such things as graphics and sound. The Apple 2 was ahead of its time in 1977, but by 1982 graphics and sound technology for 8 bit computers had advanced tremendously, and Apple COULDN'T simply upgrade to the new technology without abandoning the existing platform. Later upgrades such as 80 column cards and double hi-res graphics were as far as you could go without changing the entire format of the graphics system and breaking compatibility.
@@michaelwilliamson1392Cool theory bro. So explain why 1976 PET prototype (released in Jan 1977 as part of the trinity) was so much better than Apples. The Vic-20 was better. As were the Atari 8 bits. I am not saying they bested Apple 8bitters in every way, but yeah, overall better. You claim you had reached a kind of evolutionary dead end by the C64-- what happened to that vaunted "expandability "? And how do you explain the /// and the IIGS? They advanced without losing much compatibility.
Editing a line would drive me crazy. I moved from a Vic 20 to an Amstrad CPC 464 and that was wierd. It had a similar operation but implemented in a much better way.
You moved a copy cursor up to the line you want to edit, but your real cursor remained in place. You then press the copy key and it copies what is under the copy cursor to the real cursor. This ended up being really powerful as you could copy parts from many places on the screen to make your new line.
So to edit one value like you were attempting there, you'd move the copy cursor up, hit copy key a bunch of times constructing a version of the characters at the real cursor, then at the point you want a new value, just type it in, move the copy cursor past the old value, then continue pressing copy to copy the rest of the line.
27:19 I almost had a heart attack there when you pressed enter..... I was like "nooooooooo it starts with a 0!!!!"
We had a TI-99 4/A and a series of Atari computers while growing up (400, 1200XL, 65XE), and like most American kids, used Apple IIs at school. As a kid, I definitely thought the Atari was the better machine. 256 colors, player missile graphics, decent audio. I didn’t understand why the schools bought the Apples. But as I grew older, I learned to appreciate the things Apple brought to the table. Those expansion slots were definitely under appreciated by my younger self. But it was a huge difference. And while I could tell that the Atari floppy drive was slower than the Apple II drives, I only understood why after digging deeper into what Woz did.
The thing is that both the Atari 8-but and Apple II machines were amazing. I’m glad that I was able to grow up at a time where home computers were interesting. Even though I never had a commodore, I would gladly take the opportunity to play around with one today.
Even though these machines are less capable than the smart phones we had years ago, they just bring so much joy when playing with them these days. And they keep getting better too.
Very sad you never had a good computer as a kid. That was abuse.
My first computer was the TI-994/a. Now get off my lawn!!
It seemed like a great computer on paper.
@@saganandroid4175 It was a great computer. A computer with a thousand flaws but still great.
The lack of a backspace key on even modern Macs still drives me bonkers whenever I have to use one.
A mac does have the equivalent of a backspace key, but it's called delete. It doesn't have the equivalent of what's called delete on a windows computer, although you can do the same with fn-delete. Not as convenient though.
My Mac keyboard (wired USB) has two delete keys. The one at the top right of the main QWERTY cluster functions like a backspace. This is actually the same as the Commodore 64 and most Commodore machines. Then there's a delete key above the inverted T cursor keys, with a symbol pointing right beside it, which works like a PC keyboard delete key.
@@8_Bit Oh interesting! I didn't know the full size keyboard had that. I only have a 13 inch MacBook, so I don't have it.
To me that Apple II aesthetics remember a sort of medical device, it would fit very well in hospitals and clinics (same for the Macs, always remembered me hospital/medical devices to me, on an aesthetics point of view). The C64 brown aesthetics feel more like a wooden piece of fornitures so it fits better in a living room or in a bedroom. Regarding 16 bits, Amiga 500 has some sort of star wars X-wing aesthetics feeling to me, custom chips, multitasking, even a single A500 with 512k was super powerful and could serve a lot of things, the Atari ST was a cheap and bare bones 68000 computer, with its diagonal lines and strange colour tone it was more like a dirt cheap and fragile Tie Fighter.
BTW now you could do the same in c128 Basic using draw command (draw color, x, y)
Edit: just continuing on aesthetics: Commodore Pets with their black keys and plain white cases, scream 2001 A Space Odissey from every pore, same perhaps with the Vic20 (or perhaps Vic20 is more Buck Rogers in 25th Century, somewhat)
Returning to X-Wing vs Tie Fighter comparison, it could be applied also to C64D,C128 vs Spectrum, Plus4 and C16
I expect a 2001 PET screams Wrath Of Khan.
Haha, I felt almost telepathic for a second! When you said "size of, uh..." over here I jumped to it and filled in saying "16?" and then you said just one number higher, haha!
I was going for 10, you win with the closest. :)
@@gshingles: Heheh.
As a C64 owner, I once had the "joy" of writing a bunch of Apple ][ code for a High School teacher. My experience was just as bad as what I see you having here. Once I was done, I was absolutely sure I had made the correct choice in purchasing my C64.
Took assem on these POS machines. Awful.
I enjoyed the B-roll (beaver roll?). I'm glad I learnt BASIC on the C64 with its abbreviations and easier editing! As you were trying it out, I did wonder if changing the size would give you a faster output - 7/8 would be much closer to the original C64 PRINT 10 anyway. The penultimate version of the edited program was over 6 lines/240 characters - so assuming a 255-byte input buffer that could explain the issue you were having.
I'm not going to suggest rewriting the credits program in Applesoft BASIC - it's not worth your frustration!
I LOVE that Canadians roll with the stereotype. Makes them loveable. And Beavers are way cool animals. Get to know some, you will not regret it. They like sweet potatoes.
I always found Apples to be awkward to use, still do!
You are not wrong, I started on a pet 2001, I was spoilt from day one with on screen editing.
No other home computer ever improved upon that, I would think...why didn't they do it like the pet!!!
Uhh, this Apple editor is really a pain in the a**. I now like my C64 editor much more. Thank you. 😊 And about your journey, I like your videos and the way you present very much. Please keep it. 😊
Editing a BASIC program on an Apple II was painful back in the day. Thanks for the trip down amnesia lane.
When I took Applesoft BASIC in H.S., I'm pretty sure we never messed with editing like that - we limited the number of commands on a single program line and then retyping it wasn't such a chore. Of course, the only other programming I did back then was on a terminal to the local University's VAX for Pascal or APL, so I didn't have anything better to compare it to.
You made the right choice. The Apple doesn't even have an interrupt timer.
I was pretty shocked when I learned, after buying a special Apple II sound card to hear the music in the recent Nox Archaist RPG, that the music had to stop playing every time the disk was accessed as it couldn't do both together. Never mind the blurry artifact-driven graphics (especially the text which I barely find readable). The game is still an amazing achievement, but the hardware sure does hold it back.
No programmable raster interrupts either. Woz had no idea what interrupts were for, and it shows.
@@saganandroid4175 Woz certainly knew about interrupts. Clearly they were not necessary for the initial computer as it was designed for the constraints imposed by Jobs. Later variants of the Apple II line did have interrupts and the implementations were different. This appears to mostly be to support the mouse first added with the Apple Iic and the Apple IIe through an I/O card.
@@RetroPaul6502 depends on when. The history states the Apple ll family lacked interrupt generation because Wozniak didn't understand what they were or how they might be useful. Keep in mind this is the genius who could not get his own Apple l running and Chuck Peddle was nice/foolish enough to come to his workshop garage and show him where his mistake was. Only much later, did Wozniak start to grasp to huge benefit of interrupt generators and supporting them. But his hardware design really wasn't a great fit. Contrast to other 6502 systems that included VIA/PIA/CIA chip as integral to their design. Not a hacked in afterthought. Not something slapped on a card that almost nothing supported. Integrated. The OS made us of the 6520, 6522 or 6526 depending on the era of the 6502 machine. The irony is that Commodore, who owned MOS, could not seem to avoid bugs in those chips.
@@saganandroid4175 The Apple 2 came out the same year that Space Invaders came out so didn't foresee arcade games and was not aimed at games. What it did have that the PET and TRS-80 didn't have were colour and hi-res graphics. Both were very quirky but they had them. By the time the C64 came out arcade games had exploded in capabilities and the C64 was aimed at games. The true innovator in this space was Atari because the same company that made the Atari 400 and 800 had also been making arcade games.
I'm VERY glad I was all Commodore, and school was PETs and BBCs. If we'd had those at school I probably wouldn't have ever got into computers.
I was born 1979.. Each of my friends had a different computer. C64, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, IBM PC (yes, nearly all my friends households had a computer... I know how to pick 'em I guess). We had a TRS-80 model I (already outdated) but we made the quantum leap to an A500. I can't remember ever being talked to in a condescending way, or doing that to my friends though! I had every right to because the Amiga kicked those C64, MSX, IBM PC and ZX Spectrums asses! ;). It was a fun period in home computing with so many different types of computer. Eventually everyone got either an IBM compatible or an Amiga in the early 90ies. I went to a local computer user every month, and there were IBM compatible users and Amiga users. I do remember IBM compatible owners there talking down the Amiga a lot... At first they had no real ammo, but as we neared 1994 they did... Bought a PC soon after, kept the Amiga, sold the Amiga, sold the PC and bought a Mac early 2000, and in recent year bought back 5 Amiga's ;)
Don't forget the Amstrad CPC... I was the "odd kid" with an Apple IIc... all my friends had Amstrads, very few had Apple II-s. Commodore was not that hyped in France... we had Thomson TO7, Thomson MO5 (the French BBC micro :D), etc
@@The-Weekend-Warrior I was (still am) in The Netherlands. Never saw an Amstrad or even Apples, they were very uncommon over here probably. Interesting how the type of computer people had was determined by the region they lived in.
I was CoCo->Apple ][->PC growing up, most of my friends had C64. We were all jealous of the one kid with an Amiga :-)
I sticked with my a500 until 98 or 99 until switching to win98. Just didnt feel like upgrading earlier.
Sounds familiar. Except the C64 was pretty dominant. One late bloomer had a C128, one had an Atari ST, and I was the PC guy with an 8088 XT (also from Atari, by the way). I remember when a friend's parents later got a Mac; only black and white, but the crisp text and easy to use interface just blew my mind (and it ejected floppy disks in software, how cool was that?) But Amiga was never a big deal for us, most people migrated straight to PC, because even if it was not as colorful and had limited audio capabilities, it just had more RAM, more CPU power and the more interesting software. Sure, the Amiga had way better games, but those who were into games would rather get a console (and here we had the good old Nintendo vs. Sega war). I continued to use PCs until I started working at a company where all the desktop computers were Macs and I discovered that MacOS X was a pretty decent operating system. That's when I bought a Mac as my main work computer at home and kept my PC only for gaming, until I gave up on PCs altogether because for my causal gaming a Mac or even a tablet would do.
For the user experience everything so so much better on C64. It was very painful to watch You go over the lines over and over again :) You made that sacrifice so we don't have to :) Great video! Cheers!
Oh my heck, having no insert feature and also having to "cursor along" to the end of the line would drive me NUTS!
You always do a great job, and I love your videos. BTW, I get a bit of a kick when you make a mistake, or when things are not going well, and you do that little 'Oh....' sound. I've heard it so many times that it will make me smile when you do it, and on this video, you really gave us a great one. Normally I smile a bit when you do, but that one you did on this video made me actually laugh out loud! Keep up the good work and keep chugging along. Your fan base will be there for you.
Same same same! Robin feels like the buddy l never met. Definitely walking in the shoes of Butterfield, Suzuki, Sagan, Burke.
The Apple II never ceases to amaze me. If you've ever tried doing graphics routines in assembly on it you'd know how insane the video memory addressing is (in high res mode anyway.) Yet you can easily get BASIC to calculate sine waves on a machine that has no floating point CPU
Some people in here saying that apple had a terrible editor. It did not have one at all. Do you want it to change a semicolon or edit some text, you had to re-enter the entire line
Maybe it should be called a "replacer" instead of an editor :-)
pretty funny having the comments about Jim Butterfield at the end of an Apple video
He was quite the character, wasn't he?
When I was a kid in the '80s I would hang around computer stores and I would try the Apple IIs, now I know why I never "got it". The staff weren't inclined to help a kid with no money I guess.
I really enjoy the format and content of your videos, and this was no exception!
10:15 To add a nicer way to get back to text mode add an ONERR to trap Control-C
0 S=3:ONERR GOTO 3
1
2 END
3 TEXT
The Apple IIc startup is quite user friendly for people not so familiar with computers: most people want to boot up a program from a disk (or at least get to the point where then can run one), and if you forget to close the drive door the system makes it clear that something's gone wrong. This comes at the cost of making it slightly more difficult new users wanting to start up _without_ DOS loaded, but that's a pretty small segment of the user population.
The rest of your comments about the Apple II's problems are pretty much fair, though it's worth remembering that this is one of the very first consumer computers ever (and the first with a composite colour display and relatively high resolution graphics), and a machine whose design predates the Commodore 64 by five years. Commodore more or less invented the microcomputer BASIC screen editor in 1977 but released the PET months after the Apple II was released, so unlike other companies Apple wasn't in a position to learn from that. (I suppose Apple could have improved their screen editor along with the release of Applesoft BASIC, but it's also fair to consider that perhaps they didn't want to deal with the BIOS compatibility issues that might bring.)
That weird fading you're seeing in your capture is due to issues with where the capture device is sampling the signal and how it's interpreting colour. (Colour and small pixels--more than about 150 to 200 across, aren't actually distinguishable in NTSC.) If you want a nice solid image, try a monochrome capture (one that actually reads it as a black-and-white signal, not one that reads colour and converts). Or just use a monochrome monitor.
The sound of the Apple floppy drives still brings back happy memories of typing in programs from Nibble magazine, and playing Lode Runner, Choplifter, and Ultima 3! 😅
The Apple two had some interesting games that weren't able to duplicate on other computers. One of my favorites was sneakers, hadron add Apple panic
Considering the sound abilities, it's no wonder the sound of floppy drives are the soundtrack to your Apple memories.
Actually you *can* insert text. The trick is to cursor right over the initial text as you've done so far. But when you reach the point where you want to add anything, hit Escape, then move the cursor somewhere else on the screen (above, below, doesn't matter.)
At this point hit the space bar to exit Escape mode, type what you want, then hit Escape again. Move the cursor back to where you were in the code, hit the space bar to exit Escape mode, cursor right over everything else.
Maybe you can upload a demo video?
I want to see the code that turns those gymnastics into "Insert". Wow!
@@timsmith2525me too! Apple user friendly!
wow, that actually works. How incredibly gross and insane. How in the world did you learn about that?
@@granitepenguin It was just something I figured out as a kid back in the 80s on an Apple ][e once I realized the way the forward and backward buffer worked. This also allows deletion by escaping forward over unneeded text.
12:57 The spaces are added only in front and at the end of a token. Tokens are the BASIC keywords and the operators +,-,*,/,^. No space s are added at punctuations :,()[] and names (variable, functions). It is a very simple scheme and very consistent. It is annoyingly simple. What's even more annoying is that it adds 4 spaces on each line break if the window size id wider than 33 characters. This adds so many blanks that a BASIC line might exceed the size of the input buffer (255 bytes) and it adds these blanks even if the line break hapeen inside a string litteral. So if you copy to the buffer with -> you will add these lanks into the litteral. Solution POKE33,33 to reduce the width of the input window so that LIST does not add these blanks.
This is good advice, I had forgotten the POKE 33,33 trick.
The line input buffer is 239 characters.
We used to have a beaver on the back 80 of our farm. He built a huge lodge. Look just like you would see in the movies etc. all the tree stumps looked like they were chopped down with a hatchet.
44:45 - It's 2024, where is our super advanced version of Smell-O-Vision? I want that burning electronics smell when a RIFA capacitor explodes, gosh darn it!
Also, I feel so spoiled thanks to the Commodore screen editor. #ThankYouCommodoreEngineers
I was white knuckle afraid the whole time seeing so many things stuffed into a single line. New line numbers for almost everything here. Maybe two variables assigned together, or two print statements if I intended a double space. That way when (not if) I made a mistake it was easier to retype the offending line. I knew about the escape and cursor thing but I retyped anyway to be sure.
I grew up with a used ][+ swapped to a Laser 128 not long after. This was a super common frustration. It was easier to ditch and retype the line at that point, and avoid long lines in the first place. :P
Great video. I had a IIc back when they were new and I currently have one, but not the same one. I'm still looking for a Koala pad w/software for it. Thanks for all your work you put into your videos. You are one of the best.
42:05 Back in the day _Beagle Bros._ sold a program called *GPLE* (Global Program Line Editor) that makes editing Applesoft programs MUCH nicer.
Hilarious. Should be an OS thing.
@@saganandroid4175 Floppies at the time were only 140k. The early Apple DOS couldn't even create text files or "cat" text files. One would need to have a utility for that. Text editors were also a frustrating issue back in the day, but there was less of a need for that since BASIC was tokenized and the assembly editors also "compressed" the text files with tabs. The lack of text file support is interesting since Apple DOS has an "exec" filetype that is similar to a Windows .bat file.
It was an interesting time since people had to come up with solutions that carried forth to today.
To be negative in the retro computing and gaming world just seems so unnecessary. Thanks for your videos and what you contribute to the community.
Weak!!😂
That glitching looks like compression artifacts from your capture device. The Apple //c's video could be a contributing cause. Your Apple //c is probably working correctly.
The video output from the Apple II series can jitter at times, and while the Apple //c is less prone to jittering than say the Apple ][ Plus, it can still do it. (This jittering may be more apparent now that we're using devices with digital input stages, compared to back in the day when we used analog CRTs.)
I found this video very fun. All your videos are. I love beavers too. I’m a PC guy. But my stepfather have been using a Mac since the late 80’s. I’ve been using iPhone since 2010 though. I’m watching this video on one
I too watch beavers on my phone.
@@saganandroid4175 Beavers are best on Iphone 😂
Best day was when I showed my Apple friends digitized music/speech on my 64. Hated Apple basic so much I refused to use it in the one and only computer class I took in HS, turned in my printouts in C64 basic, the teacher was not pleased.
Apples back in the day were just like trying to use Macs with only one mouse button. Super annoying and unintuitive.
Fight the power!
This is some quality Canadian content!
The first few minutes played like a modern/weird "Hinterland Who's Who" short/PSA. 😁
LOL about that mysterious line 12 you had there for a minute! 😅
Well, this is why normally each statement would be on its own line, and if you numbered your lines by 10s there'd be room to add additional lines in between them. Still pretty neat for a computer designed in 1977.
The Apple II editor is aweful. I really don't hate Apple computers, but I do hate the media darling Apple is, and the rewriting of history to their benefit that is so common place.
Idiots in media always forget the superior PET, which beat the Apple.II to market. And they always neglect menti oning that Chuck Peddle saved Wozniak from his bad design. The naive fool.
The Apple computer of 1977 doesn't exist for the Apple computer of 2024 and the Apple II isn't a technology Apple has any interest in. Apple computer pretty much torpedoed the Apple II line of computers in the mid 80s when the focus became Macintosh.
Also, one note: once I learned about EXEC I stopped using the applesoft editor and used instead ProTERM as my text editor text files, which made it a code -> run option that didn't suck. It wasn't ideal but it worked OK enough back then. We are so spoiled now! No disk swapping or rebooting to compile anything and run anything. Just instant.
The editor adds that backslash I had forgotten all of that Im too used to Commodore now
The TI-99 owners were jealous; the Apple owners were snobs.
It used to be they would claim superiority. Now they just say "Well the C64 was a newer machine". Admitting it without wanting to admit it.
@@saganandroid4175 Just be thankful for the variety of choices. If a TI-99 works well for you, great! The fact that they put other people down suggests that they aren't really happy with their choice, and they want to make you unhappy with yours: Misery loves company.
HPLOT can draw lines as well as plot points. e.g HPLOT x,y TO x1, y1 HPLOT has another variant HPLOT TO x,y that plots a line from the previous plotted point to specified point. you can significantly speed it up by plotting lines rather than points.
All those old machines worked differently with different quirks so there's nothing surprising for me. The base default was BASIC with a few OS-ish commands. Whether or not they had anything like an "editor" for BASIC, and if they did, how it works, varied all over the place.
My first Commodore machine was the Amiga 1000. Before that I used earlier Apple 2s, TRS-80 Model 1 & Model 3, and original ZX Spectrum. Occasionally something rare and exotic, but never any PET, VIC-20, or C64.
I never used Applesoft's Basic, and I guess I was lucky. That abysmally bad editor would drive me crazy.
I think the reason for the thick lines drawn by HPLOT is the "artifact" color that Apple used. Single pixel diagonal lines would appear as alternating colors on a real CRT. It looks like your capture device is interpreting the signal as monochrome, so it's not apparent here. Try your program with HCOLOR = 1 or 2 or 5 or 6 to see a real mess. HGR in color is really only 140 x 192.
Makes me appreciate the nice screen editor on my 8-bit Atari computer.
Thank you for this great video where I discover how to edit a BASIC program on an Apple //.
Accustomed since my childhood to using the full-page editor of the Commodore 8bits, I would have been unable to get by on this machine.
But in fact, this program is not really a one-liner!
On the other hand, this 10 PRINT in high resolution graphics mode actually did it on a Commodore C128D (international AZERTY version) because on the 80col display, it does not take up more than one line (a line 10):
10 GRAPHIC1:DO:CHAR1,40*RND(1),25*RND(1),CHR$(205+2*(RND(1)
The term "one-liner" generally refers to a single logical line of BASIC, that is, it only has one line number such as line 0, 1, or 10. This line limit is often 80, 120, or 256 characters in length depending on the version of BASIC, and that's why the many BASIC coding competitions usually have different categories matching those 3 values.
One could decide on a physical single line limit, but it would vary very much from system to system: I have computers with 22, 32, 40, 64, and 80 column screens.
@@8_Bit Thank you, for all these excellent videos on a topic that means so much to me.
As a teenager, I spent most of my time trying to program my C128-D in assembly language but without much success in understanding what was happening. Now, I have all the explanations about how it works.
At the time, I didn't have the necessary documentation. No adult around me knew how to advise and guide me on the right path or show how to acquire the right manuals.
I love following your videos; I find them very well explained and they provide answers to so many old questions that have long remained unresolved.
P.S.: Concerning the "one-screen-liner", I was just kidding. My codes just take both two lines on the 40-col screen. :)
I sympathise with the editing - it's one of the few nicer features of the C64's OS and BASIC. the Acorn machines do not do full screen editing - but I think they're an improvement on the Apple - instead they have a copy key with duplicates whatever is under the cursor into the present input line - so to edit a line you copy it into the active line, then edit it there. Still a bit unwieldy but not actually confusing like this.
Your one line maze program runs perfectly on the Atari. I only had to change the character codes.
Could this be replicated with C128's BASIC 7?
Have you ever used a BBC Micro? They have odd line editing, using a _copy_ key and the cursor keys to copy parts of code and modify it. At least with that, it’s possible to insert code.
I think Woz was used to using terminals or teleprinters, and he was stuck in the "I have to do it the old way" mentality. Either that, or Woz was so good that he always typed everything correctly the first time, so he saw no need for an editor.
43:58 The commodore demo at the end had thick lines in the maze (because they were characters and not drawn lines)... so it would be totally ok to use the hplot on the //c which produces a thick line as well....
As bad the the made-for-bad-TVs C64 font was, the Apple version looks vastly worse. It has a / but the other character\ is even worse. You get gaps between lines that are even worse. C= should have kept the PET or Vic20 font.
16:50 as said POKE 33,33 will avoid most of the added whitspaces that where added.
Heheh, I liked your segment about Jim and making your style of videoing yourself as somewhat of an homage to him. Also, cool that you released this on Independence Day here in the USA (though I understand if you really gave no thought of that, ha).
It has been ages since I have played around with Apple II's wow
okay your explaining how that works makes better sense.
OK, but B-roll is really just good when it's related to what you're talking about.
Haha, "cursoring along," nice!
The confusing bit about the editing within Applesoft BASIC is that it involves two different modes -- input mode and cursor movement.
The addition of spaces in listing can be a blessing and curse -- as you discovered, when you have program lines that are near the limit it's a curse (to work with these, you'll have to keep toggling between cursor move and edit mode). Inserting text could be handled by toggling to cursor move to move cursor elsewhere (possibly even text that you might want to copy), switch to enter mode to type or cursor past text you want to copy, then toggle to cursor move mode to position to continue, toggle back to enter mode to scan past the rest of the line.
Blanks are ignored (unless part of a string constant or REM) -- so you can enter "P R I N T" and still end up with "PRINT" (assuming that there wasn't text prior to it that might affect the parser. This also meant you can't use space to indent code. It also means you can't use space to affect the parsing -- for example if you try to enter "IF A THEN PRINT A" you don't get the expected result -- you end up with "IF AT HEN PRINT A". To get the intended result you have to enter it as "IF(A)THEN PRINT A"
The editing quriks within Applesoft didn't bug me as much -- I came from a TRS-80 background where the editing was line-oriented (not too different from using EDLIN text editor on the IBM-PC) In comparison the editing method in Applesoft was more "user-friendly"
Love this Robin. Just wondering if you could save a couple of chars by assigning D as D=((RND(1)
Nooo. That's crazy! I don't remember navigating that BS back in the day...
When you changed from S to S-1 for optimization, shouldn't you have also changed 191 to 192?
I like everything about this video
Yeah, I'm glad I grew up on Commodore instead of Apple as well, but right after we got our 128 in 87 or 88 as an upgrade from our 82 64, we also got our first Apple computer: a Mac SE. I still have all of these computers (and have finally set my 128 back up just the other day). Of course I don't use the old Mac much, and right now I'm typing on my self-assembled Aorus PC. My laptop computer would be a PC too but my dad gave me his laptop computer a few years ago and it happens to be a Mac, and I haven't felt like bothering to replace my Mac laptop computer with a --real computer, aghehhmm-- PC laptop computer.
Because of all of those for l loops is why you need 3 Next statements is that right?
Was the apple IIc sold in Europe? Having a hard time finding one.
Europeans have higher standards.
as a kid I had a TI994/a and was super jealous of my neighbors who had Commodore64's
Gratuitous beaver shot.
In two different seasons!
a lot of the oddities comes from the original designs of the apple I and II by woz being woz in the 70's ... for the most part a program written for the apple II in 1977 would run on your brand new ][e platnium or //c in 1991. It took some serious nipple twisting back in the day to get my dad off the Apple II platform as he had over a decade of business data in appleworks and by the end of it I was in high school and basically shoving ram chips in our applied engineering card and got it maxed out with 2MB, quite a capable office suite machine, but yea games were the suck
When I first moved from my Commodore to a PC using DOS 2.11, I had to use the edlin editor. That is a line based editor and did not do full screen. That was a terrible surprise coming from the Commodore with all the time full screen editing. I bought a shareware (yes, I reallly paid for it) editor called QEDIT that gave me back full screen file editing. Still would have been nice to use up arrow on that version of DOS to get to previous commands. That came in a later DOS version as well as a reasonable EDIT utility. I think that was in DOS 3.3. But it's literally been decades so I'm not sure.
Apparently it wasn't until MS-DOS 5.0 that EDIT.exe appeared, in 1991 (according to the Wikipedia article)! I didn't get into MS-DOS computers until around then, so I missed all the EDLIN stuff fortunately.