Appleii Air Attack.BAS

https://basic-code.bearblog.dev/applesoft-air-attackbas/

18•ibobev•4mo ago

Comments

TMWNN•4mo ago

In 1977, the Apple II was the only personal computer in the world on which this sort of game—color, animation, sound—was possible. Not TRS-80, not Commodore PET.

Put another way, from 1977 to 1979 (when the Atari 8-bit appeared), the Apple II was the world's best video game machine.

JKCalhoun•4mo ago

I feel like "color" and "sound" should be in quotes, but point taken, ha ha.

badc0ffee•4mo ago

> Put another way, from 1977 to 1979 (when the Atari 8-bit appeared), the Apple II was the world's best video game machine.

I suppose if you restrict this to personal computers with keyboards, that's true. But the Atari VCS (2600) came out in 1977 and had better sound, and in some ways better graphics, than the Apple II.

TMWNN•4mo ago

2600's sprites and better-than-beeper sound aren't enough to make up for the Apple II's other advantages. Consider this homebrew version of Pac-Man for 2600 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPttWAND5ok>. Would you rather play that, or the Atarisoft version from 1983? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYML_8zOBXk>

badc0ffee•4mo ago

I do like the detail of the Apple II version better, but like I said the Atari 2600 did have some advantages, like a 128-colour palette that gives you a yellow Pacman.

One of my favourites from the era with a nice arctic sky (and great gameplay): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl1jGOu5No0

TMWNN•4mo ago

> better sound

Amazingly, the Atari 7800 has worse sound hardware than the 2600/5200! That's got to be up high on the list of Tramiel skinflinting.

badc0ffee•4mo ago

Is the sound just worse on 7800 games, or does it affect 2600 compatibility?

TMWNN•4mo ago

I misspoke. The 7800's sound hardware is worse than the 5200's (which is the same as the Atari 8-bit), but is the same as the 2600. Still, having audio hardware (or, really, anything else) decrease in quality from the previous generation is not a virtue for the console or Atari.

JKCalhoun•4mo ago

That's wild. I was convinced you could not do an arcade-style game in BASIC on the Apple II.

I tried (at the time) to figure out shape tables (a kind of vector graphic) as those seemed like the way to go (short of my learning assembly — which was not going to happen). I never got a shape table to appear on screen.

It's too bad there were not more system calls you could make to handle higher level graphics functionality.

deepthaw•4mo ago

The emulator runs way too fast - probably because I'm on a MacBook Pro with some bizarre refresh rate.

Very impressive demo nonetheless.

hu3•4mo ago

Same here with AMD 9800X3D processor and a 300Hz monitor.

nerdsniper•4mo ago

Yep, totally unplayable on M3 MBP. I don't think the issue is the screen refresh rate - I lowered that to the lowest it goes in System Preferences (47.95 Hz) and it's still essentially just as bad as the "ProMotion" setting (presumably 120Hz).

Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023)

Haskell for all: Beyond agentic coding

Speed up responses with fast mode

Software factories and the agentic moment

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

LLMs as the new high level language

First Proof

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Show HN: Axiomeer – An open marketplace for AI agents

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

The silent death of good code

Selection rather than prediction

I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Where did all the starships go?

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Vouch

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023)

Haskell for all: Beyond agentic coding

Speed up responses with fast mode

Software factories and the agentic moment

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

LLMs as the new high level language

First Proof

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Show HN: Axiomeer – An open marketplace for AI agents

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

The silent death of good code

Selection rather than prediction

I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Where did all the starships go?

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Vouch

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Appleii Air Attack.BAS

Comments