I particularly enjoyed this episode because of the large amount of time you spent on gaming. I don’t think you need to apologise to the non-gamery because this emphasis is probably in the minority across the overall output of your shows.

When most of the panel said that they had not played Prince of Persia on the Apple II, I was all like… pffft! Seriously, the animation on the Apple II is like silk! That went completely bye-byes as soon as they changed platforms and the artwork. That quality is really intimately attached to the hardware.

When most of the panel said that they had not used a C64, I was all like… pffft! The C64 was my other major computer growing up, but never because I owned one. It was something I would frequently play at friend’s houses, and in my experience or memory or even in nostalgia it doesn’t need to compete with the Apple II because the two systems were quite unalike, and I found them to be complementary as part of a whole experience.

The context of the Apple II, whether at my house or at a friend’s, was always that it would be on a table or desk with its own monitor (never a colour monitor). Often this table or desk would be in a room whose purpose was the computer. You would always be sitting in a chair when you played on the Apple II. The system obviously had some great action games but it also has lots of intense or intellectually absorbing adventure and RPG games which were especially suited to it, what with the fast random disk access and such. Also, it was very accessible programming wise, and solid in its behaviour.

Now let me present a contrasting picture of the context of the Commodore 64. It was always hooked up to the family colour TV, and therefore usually in the social hub of the house. You didn’t sit in a chair to play it, you would sprawl on the lounge or lie on the floor or in bed after a sleepover or whatever. It had what most would now recognise as the ambience of a PlayStation or Xbox well before that ambience had been effected by real PlayStations and Xboxes. The feel of everything to do with it was completely different to the Apple II. Its purpose in my friends’ houses was always gaming, awesome action gaming with colourful graphics and killer sound.

So what were the shortcomings of all this? Well, unlike the Apple II, C64s were never solid systems. Loading times were immense, even on the disk drive, and the hardware was always flakey. It was the kind of system where sometimes a game would load and sometimes it wouldn’t. Holding your finger up under the disc while it was loading could sometimes help. Random access by the drive was crummy. The digital joystick worked by inputting characters to the computer as if they had been typed. You can test this by wiggling a joystick at the Commodore’s BASIC prompt. But also, wiggling a joystick (and therefore inputting characters) while a program was loading could ruin the load! So compared to the Apple II, it was a bad system for adventure games that benefit from reliable random access and just reliability per se. Its BASIC was also far from robust or dependable VS the Apple IIs, so while I would share programming experiences with my friends on the Apple II, I never did on the C64, and we never team-played longterm games on a C64 either, like we would on the Apple, only action games.

When I heard Ken hadn’t heard of Wizard and the Princess, I was all like… pffft! That would have been the 2nd adventure game I played on the II. I guess I was about 6… The first was Mystery House. My dad bought both in the ziplock baggie versions.

ActiveGS works just fine on the iPad 3. As for looking better or different on the 3, hard to say, it looked awesome on the 2.

See my URL above for tips on how to add any II disk image to ActiveGS.