Re:Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
by JonathonW on Thursday September 10, 2020 @01:27PM
(#24434523)
And a 7x7 dot matrix font fits nicely into 8 (wide) x 8 (high)-- this is what the original IBM PC did. So it doesn't really make a ton of sense to go out of your way to make characters seven pixels wide unless you're anticipating that you're going to use that eighth bit for something else later (or you're really determined to have two pixels between each character rather than one for some reason, I suppose).
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Re:Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
by ddingus on Thursday September 10, 2020 @02:27PM
(#24435142)
I am inclined to think he was thinking about color.
The phase shift makes a big difference.
Having 6 colors and the artifact art variations was enough to do pretty much anything, not always well.
Had it been 4 color, it all would have been far more limited.
Frankly, the screen being good enough may be part of why graphics adapters never became common.
I always thought they should have.
Once accelerators took the 6502/816 to 4Mhz plus, a graphics adapter, perhaps combined with a faster CPU would have made a ton of sense.
The power of the default was stronger due to that 6 color capability, IMHO.
Compare 4 color CGA and it is notable.
That said, CGA over NTSC was Apple like with 16 colors, no attribute clashing. That is what an expansion card for the Apple 8 bitters should have done.