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'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Trailer Recreated on Vintage Apple IIc Computer

Guy Clark said:
Great example of what is still possible and proof that you do not need the latest Graphics to achieve impressive results. Of course this cannot be compared to modern day Graphics. To do so would be absurd but this is an example of how far Apple were ahead of the competition during that era.
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Very true. Take a look at the games available for the Apple II in the early-mid 1980s. The Penguin games in particular showed amazing detail for the hardware of the era. Transylvania came out in 1982 and it was vividly memorable, beautiful for their time. I have an original copy of Pelczarski's Graphics Magician - brilliant software. I wish I had a copy of the Penguin CGS (Complete Graphics System). So many things left to collect, so little time.

Though the 4-bit PC graphics had more consistent color, they lacked depth, if that makes any sense. I don't know why, but Apple LoRes looked better to me, even with RF-mod smearing. The 2-bit graphics (B&W) from the IBM PC looked like newspaper pics that had been run through a Xerox machine multiple times, whereas the HiRes graphics from the Apple Shared Software Library slide show (I think it was Volume 2) were amazing. And that slide show was from 1979-1980, I think.
 
Sill said:
VThough the 4-bit PC graphics had more consistent color, they lacked depth, if that makes any sense. I don't know why, but Apple LoRes looked better to me, even with RF-mod smearing. The 2-bit graphics (B&W) from the IBM PC looked like newspaper pics that had been run through a Xerox machine multiple times, whereas the HiRes graphics from the Apple Shared Software Library slide show (I think it was Volume 2) were amazing. And that slide show was from 1979-1980, I think.
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Apple had mastered rasterization earlier than other mainstream platforms. HyperCard had many great examples of that. Apple also had one of the first decent digital cameras.
 
Anonymous Freak said:
He's an artist, not a programmer. So he did what he knows - art.
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Precisely! I'm glad people are getting excited about old tech and all that. Artists make art. Driven by it, some. This isn't some grand example of technological greatness brought forth from a decades old computer. It's just the canvas an artist chose to use.
 
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JackRipper said:
Apple had mastered rasterization earlier than other mainstream platforms. HyperCard had many great examples of that. Apple also had one of the first decent digital cameras.
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I see. But what was it about rasterization that made the LoRes look better? I didn't think that would matter until we were looking at HiRes.

BTW: The original Quicktake had decent resolution for the era, but wouldn't you agree the color matching was pretty bad? There are some pics floating around from when Amelio went public with the NeXT announcement. Steve's black jacket showed up in purple, I think. I remember there was a Sikh Apple staff member there who looked almost comical with all the color flips on his suit.
 
Sill said:
I see. But what was it about rasterization that made the LoRes look better? I didn't think that would matter until we were looking at HiRes.

BTW: The original Quicktake had decent resolution for the era, but wouldn't you agree the color matching was pretty bad? There are some pics floating around from when Amelio went public with the NeXT announcement. Steve's black jacket showed up in purple, I think. I remember there was a Sikh Apple staff member there who looked almost comical with all the color flips on his suit.
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Haha! I vaguely remember that! I'm sure we can find it on youtube in some blooper video. That's well after what I was referring to. I guess I'm still on the 2-bit days. HyperCard, and the Mac for that matter, didn't get color for a long while before NeXT.
 
The Apple //c was my FIRST Apple product ever and the first ever home computer my family had. A friend of mine in high school (1984) had the IIe when everyone else had the C-64. He convinced me to go Apple and I never looked back. I actually won $200 in a school raffle later that year and I was able to add an Apple Scribe printer. I loved playing Conan the Barbarian, Bard's Tale, and Archon. It was also the only time I had to use the "//" characters to refer to a model of a product.
 
I am more impressed by the magnetic floppy discs that still work given the failure rate of HDDs is about 5 years or so
 
JosephAW said:
Ummm the audio was more than 8 bit. That should have been converted as well.
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Apple II audio was 1-bit. There was a particular memory location (-16336, if I remember correctly) which when accessed (for reading or writing) would toggle on/off the voltage to the speaker. By precisely timing access, you can produce square waves at different frequencies. More complicated sound (multiple voices, digitized audio) could be done (sort of) by frequency-modulating it, but the results were never very good. Well, they were good compared to what came before (simple beep sounds), but lousy compared to anything with an actual DAC (even a cheap low-resolution 8-bit one).

If you upgraded your II with a Mockingboard, or if you had a IIGS (with a built-in Ensoniq synthesizer) then you had much better audio, but none of that was available on a //c.

MacBH928 said:
I am more impressed by the magnetic floppy discs that still work given the failure rate of HDDs is about 5 years or so
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I'm not. I've still got my Apple ][ systems (a //c and a IIGS). Nearly all of my floppies (most dating to the late 80's) work just fine. If you store them properly (no extreme temperatures, no extreme humidity, kept away from motors and magnets) and keep your drives in good order (clean heads, occasionally calibrate speed and alignment) then those old 140K floppies can retain their data for a very long time.

Higher density media seems to have much worse longevity. Probably because there are fewer magnetic particles per bit of data on the surface.

As for hard drives, I think they tend to fail due to mechanical issues much more often than the surface losing data integrity. And due to the fact that they have incredibly high densities. (FWIW, my old Seagate ST296N 80M drive still works great. I needed to low-level format it about 20 years ago, but it hasn't had any problems since then. Of course, I don't use it very often these days either.)
 
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shamino said:
Apple II audio was 1-bit. There was a particular memory location (-16336, if I remember correctly) which when accessed (for reading or writing) would toggle on/off the voltage to the speaker. By precisely timing access, you can produce square waves at different frequencies. More complicated sound (multiple voices, digitized audio) could be done (sort of) by frequency-modulating it, but the results were never very good. Well, they were good compared to what came before (simple beep sounds), but lousy compared to anything with an actual DAC (even a cheap low-resolution 8-bit one).
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I was always amazed by the voices in Castle Wolfenstein. They didn't sound synthesized, they sounded like badly recorded human voices, which was impossible. Silas and the people at Muse did something awesome there.

shamino said:
If you upgraded your II with a Mockingboard, or if you had a IIGS (with a built-in Ensoniq synthesizer) then you had much better audio, but none of that was available on a //c.
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Mockingboard... there's something I don't have. I've got a couple of rare boards but not that one.

shamino said:
As for hard drives, I think they tend to fail due to mechanical issues much more often than the surface losing data integrity. And due to the fact that they have incredibly high densities. (FWIW, my old Seagate ST296N 80M drive still works great. I needed to low-level format it about 20 years ago, but it hasn't had any problems since then. Of course, I don't use it very often these days either.)
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I thought I was set when I got a HardCard. It failed (thanks Quantum!). Then Rich Dreher developed his CFFA firmware card. Mine is from run #2, I think, and it really is only proper in a IIe, but I think his later runs work in the ][/][+
 
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Sill said:
I was always amazed by the voices in Castle Wolfenstein. They didn't sound synthesized, they sounded like badly recorded human voices, which was impossible. Silas and the people at Muse did something awesome there.
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All done with frequency modulation and lots of careful tweaking of the algorithm to make sure it was intelligible.

Sill said:
Mockingboard... there's something I don't have. I've got a couple of rare boards but not that one.
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See Wikipedia for a description. They were pretty impressive.

As it turns out, Mockingboard model D is for a //c. It plugs into one of the serial ports and is not software compatible with models A and C (which plugged into slots).

It also appears that some modern-day enthusiasts developed a //c internal card that plugs in to the CPU socket and is compatible with a model A board. (FM synthesis but no voice.)

Sill said:
I thought I was set when I got a HardCard. It failed (thanks Quantum!). Then Rich Dreher developed his CFFA firmware card. Mine is from run #2, I think, and it really is only proper in a IIe, but I think his later runs work in the ][/][+
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I never put a hard drive on my systems - they're all still floppy based. I'm keeping my Seagate 80M drive (with its nice SCSI case) for some undetermined time in the future when I can get a SCSI card for my IIGS. Then I'll use it and a spare CD-ROM drive to make it less painful to run GS-OS. I'll also be able to actually try out the content of an old Apple Developer CD (which has the full GS developer suite - a Pascal compiler and system libraries).

Unfortunately, GS-compatible SCSI cards are not easy to find and whenever I see one on eBay, they want hundreds of dollars (scalper's prices) which I'm not willing to spend on it. The galling thing is that I saw one for $150 about ten years ago and I passed on it then, only to discover that that was probably the cheapest price I was ever going to find.
 
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shamino said:
I never put a hard drive on my systems - they're all still floppy based. I'm keeping my Seagate 80M drive (with its nice SCSI case) for some undetermined time in the future when I can get a SCSI card for my IIGS. Then I'll use it and a spare CD-ROM drive to make it less painful to run GS-OS. I'll also be able to actually try out the content of an old Apple Developer CD (which has the full GS developer suite - a Pascal compiler and system libraries).

Unfortunately, GS-compatible SCSI cards are not easy to find and whenever I see one on eBay, they want hundreds of dollars (scalper's prices) which I'm not willing to spend on it. The galling thing is that I saw one for $150 about ten years ago and I passed on it then, only to discover that that was probably the cheapest price I was ever going to find.
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What SCSI card are you looking for?

I'm sorry I didn't keep the Sider 10MB drive I had back in 1984-85. Unfortunately it only ran if you had an Apple Language Card installed as it required some odd conglomeration of both Apple Pascal and DOS 3.3 or ProDOS to run. I seem to remember having a Corvus Constellation also, but I don't know what happened to it. I still have the manual.

I know its not old school, but you should check out the CFFA. It works very well.
 
Sill said:
I was always amazed by the voices in Castle Wolfenstein. They didn't sound synthesized, they sounded like badly recorded human voices, which was impossible. Silas and the people at Muse did something awesome there.



Mockingboard... there's something I don't have. I've got a couple of rare boards but not that one.



I thought I was set when I got a HardCard. It failed (thanks Quantum!). Then Rich Dreher developed his CFFA firmware card. Mine is from run #2, I think, and it really is only proper in a IIe, but I think his later runs work in the ][/][+
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Either I am suffering from early onset Alzheimer's, or somebody messed up some QUOTE Tags, LOL!

I didn't write EITHER of the "Quotes" attributed to "MacsRuleOthersDrool", above!, HONEST! I've never had a Hard Drive with any of my Apple ][s, nor do I have any experience with the Mockingboard!!!
 
MacsRuleOthersDrool said:
Either I am suffering from early onset Alzheimer's, or somebody messed up some QUOTE Tags, LOL!

I didn't write EITHER of the "Quotes" attributed to "MacsRuleOthersDrool", above!, HONEST! I've never had a Hard Drive with any of my Apple ][s, nor do I have any experience with the Mockingboard!!!
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I think it happened when I was going through a marathon quote and respond session with you in "our" thread. The email that I had been responded to came through when I was in my last post to you, and I already had your quote link in my clipboard. I fixed it, so you may return from whence you came. Sorry about my confusion.
 
Sill said:
I think it happened when I was going through a marathon quote and respond session with you in "our" thread. The email that I had been responded to came through when I was in my last post to you, and I already had your quote link in my clipboard. I fixed it, so you may return from whence you came. Sorry about my confusion.
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No worries! I just thought my macrumors account had been hacked for a moment, LOL!
 
Sill said:
What SCSI card are you looking for?
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Anything that can boot a hard drive and mount a CD-ROM. :)

As far as I know, there were two models. The Apple II SCSI card (designed for the II, II+ and IIe) and the Apple High Speed SCSI card (designed for the GS, but backward compatible with other models.)

I think Applied Engineering also made a SCSI card

The Apple High Speed SCSI card would be ideal, but I assume any of the three would get the job done.

Sill said:
I know its not old school, but you should check out the CFFA. It works very well.
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Thanks for the tip. I've seen a few things like this, to mount a CF card or an SD card. I even saw one that emulates a floppy drive (load a bunch of floppy images onto an SD card and emulate one at a time.) I may have to get one if I find the time to seriously pursue this hobby again.

The only annoying thing is that ProDOS has a limit to 32M per drive partition. Any modern hard drive would completely fill the screen with nothing but drive icons, assuming I could actually create that many partitions.

But I think GS-OS has a module that will let it mount Mac HFS volumes (with a 2TB limit) so I may be OK with one or two ProDOS partitions for the system software and then an HFS partition for everything else. And also for file exchange with my Mac (1.44M floppies or maybe Zip drives, since I have both SCSI and USB drives available.)
 
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Mockingboard! We never ha one of those things. I remember trying, very naively, and without any success,whatsoever to see if Ultima IV for the Apple II could somehow make music using the GS's ensoniq. But Apple wasn't so generous as to supply Mockingboard emulation. Oh well.
 
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