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Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

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Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#91

Post by justin66 »

sleepybrett wrote: post #59
justin66 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on i…

Growing up my friend had one (a 500), I don't remember finding anything in my pile of pirated floppies that he couldn't run.

I assume they used clean-room techniques after those were judged by the courts to be viable. I wonder if that happened because of Franklin's efforts or because of what happened in the IBM PC clone industry.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#92

Post by drzaiusx11 »

djmips wrote: post #37
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly their argument works for me. It truly cannot be "100% compatible" without sharing the same memory layout/contents in this case. Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. I find it more "sad" than "upsetting" as the original author implies in this piece. Personally, I love cloned hardware and software. I seek out clones when…

How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?

Yes, although there are a number of ways to "cheat" aside from just pulling chips...

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#94

Post by drzaiusx11 »

fortran77 wrote: post #79
dhosek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screens were low enough resolution back then that you could look closely at the screen to see how he got the six hires colors.

I'm scratching my head over your statement. You can see how they generated artifact color on the back porch of the colorburst by looking at the screen? You can see the phaase of their color reference wrt the pixel clock? Please explain. See https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-compos... for how it really works.

I assume they meant the unintended rainbow-like color halos and vertical line artifacts plainly visible on a good crt, particularly on edges due to Woz's design where there is no direct pixel color really; rather, a "1" in a specific "phase" (odd or even column) of a pixel byte would tell the TV to output a certain color, like green or magenta. It simply walked the bits in memory as if they were chroma patterns, in rough approximation.

That said I'll read up on the linked article, I could me misremembering things.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#95

Post by drzaiusx11 »

justin66 wrote: post #39
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly their argument works for me. It truly cannot be "100% compatible" without sharing the same memory layout/contents in this case. Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. I find it more "sad" than "upsetting" as the original author implies in this piece. Personally, I love cloned hardware and software. I seek out clones when…

> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on i…

"Copy protections" back in the day often looked for fixed strings in seemingly random places. In the worst cases, this even went outside the machine's memory addresses. Several programs I had would farm this task out to the users and ask for specific words from specific pages in manuals on particular lines. I had to hex dump the binary's lookup tables to even get older software to run many a time ;-)

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#96

Post by drzaiusx11 »

djmips wrote: post #37
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly their argument works for me. It truly cannot be "100% compatible" without sharing the same memory layout/contents in this case. Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. I find it more "sad" than "upsetting" as the original author implies in this piece. Personally, I love cloned hardware and software. I seek out clones when…

How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?

Apparently my terse sister comment is beyond the edit timeout threshold, I had meant to follow up with more details.

If there's interest around general "chip emulation" techniques I've employed, I could try and do a blog write-up. The first attempt was using a PIC32 with a bunch of lookup tables a couple decades ago. Then I played with fpgas (the cheap lattice ones.) My latest attempts relied on a combination of SoC and inline rom dumps using all the known bank switching schemes, which tbh was a pita to validate until I finally bought a harmony cart (I was eproming up until a decade ago.) The SoC design allowed me to use a ARM that could output HDMI (via daughter board) with various filters to mimic CRTs artifacts and the like which I found fun.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#97

Post by dhosek »

fortran77 wrote: post #79
dhosek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screens were low enough resolution back then that you could look closely at the screen to see how he got the six hires colors.

I'm scratching my head over your statement. You can see how they generated artifact color on the back porch of the colorburst by looking at the screen? You can see the phaase of their color reference wrt the pixel clock? Please explain. See https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-compos... for how it really works.

Each “medium-res” pixel (140 across) on the screen could be seen to be three distinct colored pixels: red, blue and green. Purple was created by turning on the left two pixels, green the right most. Likewise red the leftmost and cyan the right two pixels. Only on a black and white display did you actually get 280 pixels without color artifacts.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#98

Post by justin66 »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #95
justin66 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on i…

"Copy protections" back in the day often looked for fixed strings in seemingly random places. In the worst cases, this even went outside the machine's memory addresses. Several programs I had would farm this task out to the users and ask for specific words from specific pages in manuals on particular lines. I had to hex dump the binary's lookup tables to even get older software to run many a time ;-)

I'm not sure why copy protection came up on this thread but when it came to the Apple II, one of the more effective methods was to intentionally include a damaged or unreadable sector at a predictable place on the software's floppy. A standard copy would bomb out on one of these disks, but of course special copy software could do something with a disk like that.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#99

Post by shinjitsu »

dwgumby wrote: post #70
shinjitsu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big was the Franklin back then? My uncle worked there in the 1980s, but I was a kid and have no concept of if it was a scappy startup or a midsized company.

When it started it was a scrappy startup, a handful of people. I went there because my old boss, Dave McWherter, essentially was the engineering department. Grew slowly to maybe a hundred people. Then exploded to several times that at least. At the end there were active projects for: a portable Apple II clone, a PC clone, portable CP/M machine (think Osbourne One), MSX game machine, and probably more. Way too big way…

Patrick Santore - he worked there sometime in the mid-late 1980s
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