Yea, it's very difficult to tell what anything is if you haven't played the game. At first I thought he may have just automated converting all the assets, but no .. there' is a video of the conversation process. Looks like he's doing at least some, if not all of it, by hand.

The stoneship age video looks better/playable, but I guess the developer is just hitting the hard limits of that platform.

It seems it was all by hand. From the FAQ:

> Q. So how did you draw the graphics?

> A. So for 40x48 resolution you can't just take a paint program and have it do this automatically. That tends to lose a lot of important details.

> Usually I take a screenshot and drop a 40x48 grid on top and then trace over it.

Only because they've decided to use the low resolution graphics mode of the IIe. It has higher resolution modes he could have used

That would lower the frame rate.

it's also a matter of size. lores graphics are 1k (they usually compress at least 50%). There are 800 backgrounds in the demake. You want to fit this on a reasonable number of floppy disks, in this case it fits on 3.

If you use "hi-res" (140x192x6 colors) the graphics are 8k, 8 times bigger, so you need 24 disks which is a bit much.

Also with double-buffered hi-res graphics you waste 16k of RAM which is 1/3 of all available RAM on a II+. Double-buffered lo-res only takes 2k.

also note this will run fine on a stock system from 1980: an Apple II+ with 48k RAM (1MHz 6502) and a 16-sector 140k DOS3.3 Disk ][ drive.

If you're a commodore person, you should be comparing this with what you could do with a PET or maybe a VIC-20 in this timeframe (not a C64).

That's nice because all the Apple machines can run the program.

A split the middle might have been double low res, 80x48 with the same 16 colors, but only available on the //e and gs

IMHO, running on all the Apples is the better call.

It was a joke considering it is point-and-click, but the size difference was the real reason that came to mind.

That tracks with my experience of game difficulty from this era of computing. eg Wizard of Oz, the Hobbit, etc. Then again, I was a young kid.