The Apple II+ was my first Apple. My second one was a Macbook Air M3!
The Apple II has a very interesting and quirky software collection. Quite a few weird little games made by bedroom coders, along many of the earliest titles of the big names.
I highly recommend anyone who's interested in "retro games" to explore the Apple II collection. Many are unplayable by modern standards, but you can use walkthroughs and save states to see what these games have to offer. Today "retro" is largely about consoles, but there are only so many times one can watch NES speedruns on Youtube!
I'm slightly miffed that the pictured computer is technically an Apple IIc (though I'm sure they meant the Apple II family). Mainly because there actually was an Apple II computer. I see the original article got this detail correct.
A bit pedantic, I realize, but the original Apple II had a max of 48k of RAM, while the IIc had significantly more ram at 128k. Software is (AFAIK) otherwise compatible between them.
System requirements for a product are not expressions of belief in them being tight lower bounds. They are a body of excuses for not providing support to a user with any kind of issue plausibly attributable to their system being outdated.
Monochrome only, and it downscales. Only 1/4th of the pixels' IDCTs are computed, for "speed".
It is also hardcoded for 640x480 images, again, for "speed" :-)
It's based on picojpeg, heavily reworked to get rid of about all intermediate buffers, core decoder functions rewritten in assembly.
The Apple II+ was my first Apple. My second one was a Macbook Air M3!
The Apple II has a very interesting and quirky software collection. Quite a few weird little games made by bedroom coders, along many of the earliest titles of the big names.
I highly recommend anyone who's interested in "retro games" to explore the Apple II collection. Many are unplayable by modern standards, but you can use walkthroughs and save states to see what these games have to offer. Today "retro" is largely about consoles, but there are only so many times one can watch NES speedruns on Youtube!
5! Apple IIc at age 8, Macbook Air M3 at age let's not talk about it XD
I'm slightly miffed that the pictured computer is technically an Apple IIc (though I'm sure they meant the Apple II family). Mainly because there actually was an Apple II computer. I see the original article got this detail correct.
A bit pedantic, I realize, but the original Apple II had a max of 48k of RAM, while the IIc had significantly more ram at 128k. Software is (AFAIK) otherwise compatible between them.
You could bulk them up to 64k if you were rich. They didn't give those 4116s away, though. Good thing RAM is cheap now!
System requirements for a product are not expressions of belief in them being tight lower bounds. They are a body of excuses for not providing support to a user with any kind of issue plausibly attributable to their system being outdated.
So this is a JPEG decoder that runs on an Apple II? Monochrome only, or can it do color?
Author here.
Monochrome only, and it downscales. Only 1/4th of the pixels' IDCTs are computed, for "speed". It is also hardcoded for 640x480 images, again, for "speed" :-)
It's based on picojpeg, heavily reworked to get rid of about all intermediate buffers, core decoder functions rewritten in assembly.