The development of that code was very painful. At the time, there was no external debugger. The moment you enabled the interrupt, your interrupt handler would get called, and it would try to program a context switch (something the 6502 is definitely not supposed to do). If you had any bug in there, your Apple II would be completely frozen, all you could do is reboot, and try to guess what went wrong and try again.
vardump•2h ago
zellyn•1h ago
The Commodore 64 is _so_ much better for graphics and sound it's not even funny, but if you look at the timelines, it came along a _while_ later than the Apple II.
AndrewStephens•1h ago
In its defense, it also predates a lot of what we take for granted. The idea that a game might want to scroll smoothly or update at 50/60 FPS without flickering just didn't occur to people in 1979.
mrob•1h ago
AndrewStephens•1h ago
wat10000•2m ago
Cost was the innovation for those early home computers. They weren’t doing anything remarkable, except for doing it at a price ordinary people could actually afford. If you were willing to spend more (because the computer ran your payroll, or because the computer got people to drop quarters into it all day long) you could get much more capable stuff.
These days you can drop a few hundred bucks and get something that’s not too far off from the best that money can buy. The main difference between a cheap PC and what passes for a “supercomputer” these days is that the supercomputer has much better interconnects and there’s just a lot more of it.
colinlm•1h ago
Without the mouse IRQ, if one wants to support the whole line of Apple II computers, one has to vapor lock on the II+, remember that the IIgs's $C019 high bit means the inverse than the IIe, and the //c requires more trickery around it. (cf https://github.com/cc65/cc65/blob/master/libsrc/apple2/waitv...)
mjevans•31m ago
Thus there was downtime for an otherwise idle chip to do some work, and yes, saving a few dollars or 10s of dollars in 1970s money was a LOT of money!