Retro Apple Rambling
Nate Trost correctly mentioned what I would consider to be the shocking secret of the Apple II Video Overlay Card: when placed in an Apple IIe, it allows you to have access to, and fully use, all the graphics modes on the Apple IIgs! I wonder if any software was ever written to take advantage of this. Somehow I doubt it.
It's essentially a packaging of the graphics chip found in the IIgs onto an expansion card. When placed in the IIgs, it worked in tandem with the built-in graphics chip to give you interlaced support (doubling the vertical resolution for super hi-res graphics). I believe it also allowed you to overlay actual video (e.g. from a video camera or other input) onto the IIgs screen. I could be wrong on that last point though - I haven't cracked open my card to see; I've been too busy lately.
I did finally turn on my Apple ///+ this past weekend. It mostly works, but 80-column mode is very broken. It stays fixed in 40-column mode no matter what. I've ordered some replacement chips for cheap; hopefully this will do the trick. This is a hard machine to troubleshoot as you can't easily run it with the motherboard fully exposed. I hope to post some pictures as time permits. It's pretty hard to get much more than a token press release blurb of info on the Apple ///+ off the net, and pictures are rarer still.
Speaking of hard to find, Apple designed a color RGB monitor to work with the Apple ///, which has a unique RGB port. This monitor appears to be unbelievably difficult to find. I believe it was called the Applecolor Monitor 100. It basically looked like a really fat and bloated Monitor II and had a motorized tilt screen. I cannot find any pictures at all of this on the net. I believe the Apple model number is A9M0308. If you have one of these, I'd like to talk to you. :-)
Comments
Perhaps you can give us a little postmortem of the Civ IV port?
I saw on macgamer that it is GM and probably shipping soon.
What is your next project?
Posted by: mevdev | June 20, 2006 11:18 AM
I second the motion for a postmortem!!
Posted by: Anm | June 20, 2006 01:12 PM
I'd sad that Civ IV requires a G5 or Intel proc. I was going to buy it to play on my PowerBook G4 1.5Ghz.
Posted by: Humbaba | June 21, 2006 08:26 AM
"Perhaps you can give us a little postmortem of the Civ IV port?"
That would be interesting, no doubt. However, I have a restriction in that I'm not allowed to say negative things about various aspects of my work. To do a postmortem properly, I'd invariably have to bitch a little (this is true of any game port and is definitely not Civ4 specific).
Otherwise it'd sound like the typical wank-fest postmortems on Gamasutra where every negative thing is really something positive like "we worked too hard" or some BS. Self-censoring is not something I do easily. :-)
Posted by: Brad Oliver | June 22, 2006 11:52 PM
I am considering buying Civ IV. I really am a huge RTS fan, and the crappy graphics and turn-based ways of civ 1-3 really didn't interested me all that much. Is there much in store for Civ IV except better graphics?
Posted by: mevdev | June 27, 2006 09:41 AM
The Video Overlay Card can indeed genlock to external video - that's it's entire reason for being :-) You picked an RGB color for chroma-keying and anything on the IIgs screen that was the right color would magically become NTSC video. There was even a freeware app someone wrote for using one to subtitle anime.
Posted by: Arbee | July 27, 2006 10:55 PM
Hello I have a Apple IIgs Video Overlay Developer Card and software for sale on ebay item number 330185686024
Posted by: dave | November 7, 2007 10:14 AM