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Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

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Re: Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

#31

Post by vardump »

vardump wrote: post #11

C64 Lemmings playthrough, all 100 levels: https://youtu.be/lTKmyqqugG0 Features scrolling (!), although with a narrower playground. C64 truly gets pushed hard here. Impressively, even Shadow of the Beast level is there: https://youtu.be/lTKmyqqugG0?t=2443 The biggest advantage for C64 is of course sprites. C64 version used them for the background, that's why it's narrower. More details about making of C64 Lemmings: h…

Note: Links to parts 2 and 3 didn't seem to exist anymore in that article. But they were easy to find just by changing the URL, so here they are:

Part 2: https://codetapper.com/c64/diary-of-a-game/lemmings/the-maki...

Part 3: https://codetapper.com/c64/diary-of-a-game/lemmings/the-maki...

Re: Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

#32

Post by dhosek »

rbanffy wrote: post #18
Lio wrote: post #2

I love these sorts of what if experiments. Just how far can we push these old machines? What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I always wondered if it would be possible to run Doom in a meaningful way on the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes[1], the first computer with an Arm processor[2]. It had 256 colour chunky pixels, 8-channel stereo sound and a, for the time, v…

> What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for. Very powerful for the clock, but going with the 68000 allowed the Mac to continue relevant up until the transition to PowerPC. > What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I think the best missed opportunity of the Amiga was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to sell the 3000 as a low-end Unix work…

I still wish VMS had managed to survive the 90s. I still think its CLI has not been excelled (and there’s something to be said for requiring commands to be registered rather than just treating any executable on the path as a command).

Re: Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

#33

Post by dhosek »

dhosek wrote: post #32
rbanffy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for. Very powerful for the clock, but going with the 68000 allowed the Mac to continue relevant up until the transition to PowerPC. > What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I think the best missed opportunity of the Amiga was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to sell the 3000 as a low-end Unix work…

I still wish VMS had managed to survive the 90s. I still think its CLI has not been excelled (and there’s something to be said for requiring commands to be registered rather than just treating any executable on the path as a command).

And yes, I know about OpenVMS, but it’s not really a player in any meaningful way.

Re: Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

#35

Post by dhosek »

joezydeco wrote: post #25
partomniscient wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's what the logo looked like: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smithsonian_National...

It's kind of a fun shibboleth for those of us that hacked on the systems back in the day. The ROM used ][ instead of II and we used that string when we discussed the computer online. I still type it that way just out of pride. It's kind of like C64 hackers that say KERNAL instead of "kernel" since that's what Commodore docs called it.

And for added fun, although ] and [ were in the ASCII subset that the Apple ][ used, they were not on the keyboard. I remember writing a program in AppleSoft Basic that was a very limited word processor that used the ctrl key as shift and displayed uppercase using inverse (which was a bad choice because then the return key gave M as its output rather than a new line), and finding that I could get half the logo through the esc key.

Re: Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

#36

Post by balls187 »

joezydeco wrote: post #25
partomniscient wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's what the logo looked like: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smithsonian_National...

It's kind of a fun shibboleth for those of us that hacked on the systems back in the day. The ROM used ][ instead of II and we used that string when we discussed the computer online. I still type it that way just out of pride. It's kind of like C64 hackers that say KERNAL instead of "kernel" since that's what Commodore docs called it.

> those of us that hacked on the systems back in the day.

Thanks for letting us stand on your shoulders :)

Re: Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

#38

Post by Lio »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #10
Lio wrote: post #2

I love these sorts of what if experiments. Just how far can we push these old machines? What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I always wondered if it would be possible to run Doom in a meaningful way on the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes[1], the first computer with an Arm processor[2]. It had 256 colour chunky pixels, 8-channel stereo sound and a, for the time, v…

There was a port of it to the Archimedes.

Yes that’s true but not in 1987 on the original Arm 2 Archimedes.

Re: Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept

#39

Post by StillBored »

rbanffy wrote: post #18
Lio wrote: post #2

I love these sorts of what if experiments. Just how far can we push these old machines? What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I always wondered if it would be possible to run Doom in a meaningful way on the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes[1], the first computer with an Arm processor[2]. It had 256 colour chunky pixels, 8-channel stereo sound and a, for the time, v…

> What if Apple pushed IIGS over the Mac? The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for. Very powerful for the clock, but going with the 68000 allowed the Mac to continue relevant up until the transition to PowerPC. > What if Commadore had got behind the Amiga properly? I think the best missed opportunity of the Amiga was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to sell the 3000 as a low-end Unix work…

> The II was a dead end. The 65816 was not a nice ISA to program for.

I mean you make this statement like its some kind of technical roadblock. Which might have seemed appropriate in the early 1980's but with a bit of digging would have been understood to be false.

There have been various proposals for 32-bit 65816's, and it wouldn't have been any different than any of the other architectural extensions done to other processors (never mind the conversion from 6502->65816). Modal decoders (ex: Arm), prefix bytes (ex: amd64), virtual execution modes (ex: vm86/i386), etc all provide a method for building a new architecture while maintaining backwards compatibility with the old.

This stuff is an economic or business decision. At Apple apparently it was a political/business decision, rather than anything technical. They could have (as the IIGS proved) just have created an mac like experience on the apple ][ line, while maintaining software compatibility. None of it would have been "pretty", but that is almost always the costs associated with evolving a technology stack. It took roughly a decade to evolve linux from a UP kernel to a SMP one without the BKL. In that time, and some of the results weren't what anyone would call pretty.

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