That sentence is the Apple II hardware in a nutshell! save a chip or two but completely scramble the video buffer? Absolutely!
The Commodore 64 is _so_ much better for graphics and sound it's not even funny, but if you look at the timelines, it came along a _while_ later than the Apple II.
>That sentence is the Apple II hardware in a nutshell! save a chip or two but completely scramble the video buffer? Absolutely!
Woz is one of the greatest engineers of the 20th century, and the Apple II demonstrates his talent. But his brilliance at simplifying things always straddles the line between optimized and overoptimized. The Disk II might be his greatest feat at doing more with less, while the video circuitry falls just into overoptimization, given the color fringing, NTSC dependence for color, and lack of lowercase. Integer BASIC is somewhere in the middle; great performance (especially given (or maybe because) Woz knew nothing about mainstream BASIC), but the code is so tightly written that it was easier for Apple to license Microsoft BASIC than to add floating-point code to Woz's work.
The Commodore 64 is _so_ much better for graphics and sound it's not even funny, but if you look at the timelines, it came along a _while_ later than the Apple II.