Apple II Lores Mode7 FAQ

1. Is the lady riding the snowbeast some sort of reference to the Second Reality Demo?
   
   Maybe.
   
   
2. Why is she wearing an orange dress?
   
   A friend once wrote a fantasy novel and the heroine wore an orange dress. All of the women who read the novel complained this was unrealistic as it is apparently hard to find a flattering dress in orange.
   
   
3. Why does your 3d-sphere look so awful?
   
   If you only 50 pixels had, also look great you would not.
   
   
4. Are the people/things listed in the credits real?
   
   Some of them are guinea pigs.
   
   
5. Are you going to submit this to a demo competition?
   
   I don't follow the demo scene so I have absolutely no idea if there would be any interest or if this would be laughed off stage as being horribly amateurish. I might be at Kansasfest'18 this year though if that counts.
   
   
6. Did you write the music?
   
   No, this is a cut up and spliced together mix of the song "Electric Wave" from CC'00 by EA (Ilya Abrosimov). I haven't been able to find contact info for him, if you have any please let me know.
   
   
7. Why do you program in Lowres mode?
   
   Horrible as it is, it's much nicer than the hires mode. I like having the extra colors even though it's blocky.
   
   
8. Why not do double-lores?
   
   Because it's about ten times the pain for only twice the resolution. Also, I like targeting really old Apple II hardware (this code could run on an Apple II from 1977 in theory, double hi-res wasn't around until the Apple IIe 10 years later).
   
   
9. Why is there tearing on the scroll text? Don't you have a VBLANK interrupt?
   
   No, the original Apple II had no real way of checking for VBLANK. There were tricky ways (reading the floating bus) and later models eventually added a VBLANK register but this was sort of non-standard and varied between models.
   
   
10. Why target such old hardware?
    
    So I can troll Commodore 64 users.
    
    
11. What's the most infuriating thing about 6502 assembly?
    
    There are many things, but currently it's how easy it is to forget a # on a constant and then have your code mysteriously fail based on some random value in the zero page. Also accidentally sticking $ in front of decimal values out of habit and then staring at the screen for hours and not noticing.