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Major flashbacks and questions on Apple II floppies / development

G

GoldenEagle

New Member
Joined
Nov 19, 2013
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2
Hi all,

I'm kickin' it old school and had a question. With the 5.25" floppies, was (or is) it possible to format one side of the floppy to one system and the other side to a different system? In other words, could you have an Apple II game on one side and a C64/TI-99/TRS-80 game on the other side? It's not obvious to me how the formatting process on one side would impact the other. (I think the Apple and C64 both used GCR encoding...not sure if that matters.)

Also, I was reading about Bill Budge's early efforts, like Pinball Construction Set, and how he developed for the "Apple II". There were several Apple II models, and they seemed vastly different to me at the time in terms of speed and polish. From a developer standpoint, was it all the same? If you wrote a commercial program in assembly, did it matter if it was run on a IIe or II+ or plain old II? I'm amazed anything with significant graphics ran on the original II, but maybe I'm underestimating it. Budge was a maestro of Apple II graphics -- I'm just surprised he and other didn't need to set a II+ as a minimum requirement. (I think the number of colors changed at one point, which would seem to affect game code.)

Cheers,

Joe
 
I see no reason why you could not however you had to take into the account that if a single sided drive have a stronger write current than another system it might potentially start flipping bits on the opposite side.
 
An early version of Chessmaster was packaged on a floppy with one side being for Atari and the other for Commodore 64.

I don't know of any Apple II plus other system packaged diskettes but probably were some. I know that I read a web page a few years ago that devoted effort to looking at multi-system formatted floppies which became quite baroque as double sided disks took over. Unfortunately, I don't remember the page nor can I think of a search that would show it.
 
NeXT said:
I see no reason why you could not however you had to take into the account that if a single sided drive have a stronger write current than another system it might potentially start flipping bits on the opposite side.
Click to expand...
Give an example of such 5.25 drive ;)

GoldenEagle, you can safely use both sides of a double sided diskette the way you want.
 
GoldenEagle said:
I'm kickin' it old school and had a question. With the 5.25" floppies
Click to expand...
There's no better way.

GoldenEagle said:
was (or is) it possible to format one side of the floppy to one system and the other side to a different system? In other words, could you have an Apple II game on one side and a C64/TI-99/TRS-80 game on the other side?
Click to expand...
All of the systems you mentioned had (or at least started out with) single sided drives. That means that the read/write head was on the bottom of the drive looking up. Flipping the disk over (along with a write enable notch cut out, if appropriate) could of course be used by any other single-sided disk system. For systems with double-sided drives (1571, later TRS-80, etc.) this would not work since read/write heads were already on both sides of the disk media simultaneously.

GoldenEagle said:
Also, I was reading about Bill Budge's early efforts, like Pinball Construction Set, and how he developed for the "Apple II". There were several Apple II models, and they seemed vastly different to me at the time in terms of speed and polish. From a developer standpoint, was it all the same?
Click to expand...
Yes. Each successive model added features and functions. As long as you didn't expect a 1977 Apple II to exploit 1986 IIgs features, you were golden. This is why you see commercial software with hardware requirements on it... IIe, 64k, whatever. They targeted whatever features they needed, and that dictated where along the spectrum you could enter the fray. To make a gross simplification, all successive models were completely backwards compatible with everything that came before it. If you wrote for model X, it worked on model X and everything that came later.

GoldenEagle said:
If you wrote a commercial program in assembly, did it matter if it was run on a IIe or II+ or plain old II?
Click to expand...
That depends on what you exploited; but in general, for hires graphics, as long as you had the memory - it ran. There was a very early modification to the first Apple II that increased colors, but there were relatively few of those models out there. Likewise, when double-hires graphics came out in the revB Apple IIe, there were relatively few revA models out there that couldn't exploit them.

GoldenEagle said:
I'm amazed anything with significant graphics ran on the original II, but maybe I'm underestimating it.
Click to expand...
I assure you, you are. Double hires was the first real expansion of graphics capabilities, and as I mentioned, it didn't arrive until revB Apple IIe.
 
You guys are my heroes.

I'm retroactively fantasizing about owning this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSD_Super_Disk All of a sudden, the idea of owning an extremely well-engineered, built-like-a-tank, reliable floppy drive seems totally legit. Those were interesting times, with seemingly lots of smart engineers making and perfecting products that had not existed for very long. I'm amazed at how we even communicated. If I wanted to look a company up, there really wasn't any way of doing that, except by calling them if I happened to have their number. We were all stranded.

This basic computer project got me flashing back: http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2013/...ego-style-step-step-instructions/?fromcat=all

I had no idea ARM was so old -- Acorn used it on their home PCs in the 80s and Apple was involved in the chip design in the early 1990s apparently, for the Newton.
 
I had 'Learn to Spell' from Spinnaker. It's on a flippy diskette -- side one is Apple and side two is IBM/180k format. I had no trouble reading the IBM side on a DSDD or DSHD drive.
 
IIRC there were some (or at least one) commercial floppy game(s) with BOTH Apple and IBM(or was it C64?) versions on the SAME side of a disk, not sure what kind of voodoo or witchcraft was involved with that, but it was effective copy protection for both versions of the game. I know its been brought up on this forum some time in the past in the context of copy protection and duplication, maybe someone with better search-fu than I can find that conversation.
 
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