[dwgumby]

> Reviewers were even able to pull cards out of an Apple ][ motherboard, plug them into an ACE machine, and they’d work without any other modifications

Which was kind of the point? If I remember correctly Woz had patents related to the video generation hardware which Franklin did change to try to avoid infringing but I can’t remember if the court agreed that it did it successfully.

[drzaiusx11]

Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article. The author implies "the nerve of them", when they're simply providing exactly what they advertise: a 100% compatible machine.

[Projectiboga]

I had one, I believe they never delivered on the color compatibility. Mine came with an easy on the eyes amber crt.

Here it is the Ace 1000 was greyscale only but was 80 column.

Wohlscheid - Computer Ads from the Past Unfortunately, the Franklin didn't copy the Apple's ability to display color graphics. It was limited to “shades of grey and black and white”. https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/franklins-ace-...

I got the computer with an 80 column graphics card one floppy drive and an amber monitor. It was less than a similar Apple bundle. I got mine in December 1980. I also got a disk of copy programs and a floppy with a few pirated games. Those two got me started as an early pirate video game collector. That was freshman year of high school. I grew out of video games a few years later. I did use it for word processing in college. I had a decent dot matrix printer which had a parallel interface but I chose to take floppy to a study location with a small printing lab. I would copy my file from the 5.5" to a 3.5" pro-dos formatted disc. Then open the doc in Word on a Mac and get it formatted nicer. I don't recall if Word had Auto-Format back then. And laser print my paper for a sharp look. I still keep a licensed Word on hand just for that single feature. I printed a few papers using my Franklin to Smith Corona typewriter via a cable, had an english teacher who didn't want dot matrix and that was more fun than typing manually. Whew this brought back a flood of my early tech memories.

[drzaiusx11]

To be fair, the way Woz did color on the ][ was pretty wild, but unfortunate they weren't able to properly copy that as well...

[dhosek]

Screens were low enough resolution back then that you could look closely at the screen to see how he got the six hires colors.

[fortran77]

I'm scratching my head over your statement. You can see how they generated artifact color on the back porch of the colorburst by looking at the screen? You can see the phaase of their color reference wrt the pixel clock? Please explain.

See https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-compos... for how it really works.

[drzaiusx11]

I assume they meant the unintended rainbow-like color halos and vertical line artifacts plainly visible on a good crt, particularly on edges due to Woz's design where there is no direct pixel color really; rather, a "1" in a specific "phase" (odd or even column) of a pixel byte would tell the TV to output a certain color, like green or magenta. It simply walked the bits in memory as if they were chroma patterns, in rough approximation.

That said I'll read up on the linked article, I could me misremembering things.

[dhosek]

Each “medium-res” pixel (140 across) on the screen could be seen to be three distinct colored pixels: red, blue and green. Purple was created by turning on the left two pixels, green the right most. Likewise red the leftmost and cyan the right two pixels. Only on a black and white display did you actually get 280 pixels without color artifacts.

[Projectiboga]

They were able to get color working on the subsequent 1200 model. And I believe color was accessable via an expansion card, I didnt want to be staring at a tv at short distances so I was content to game in monochrome.