- This was such a great game. There was so much diversity among the enemies and they would attack each other as well as you. Non-stop action and so much going on at once, you couldn't turn your attention away from it for a second.
- I can't believe those are Apple II graphics, and one with only 48k too!
- I remember when the WDC homepage featured a big Terbium section trying to build hype for a 32-bit CPU. I got so excited over the idea at first but it clearly wasn't going anywhere. ARM has done a great job filling that niche in the meantime.
- I'm happy with my v1 but the DaynaPORT emulation in the v2 makes this a tempting upgrade.
The net result is one does get the full 1Mhz available.
On a C64, for example, the clock is very similar, but the CPU is halted a lot for video DMA to happen. Now, that DMA is for redefinable character graphics and sprites, so it is worth the wait because the CPU would be much slower.
The end result is doing all bitmap graphics on a C64 seems very slow compared to doing the same thing on an Apple ][ computer.
The other thing in play is Apple programmers often take advantage of self modifying code as well as the byte boundaries to maximize what speed they can get just pushing pixels.
For a great example of this in the arcade, the Williams game DEFENDER does all its drawing on a bitmap and uses a 1Mhz 6809. To be fair, Williams did set the bitmap addressing up much better than the Apple ended up with, but still.
An 8 bit CPU can do more than one might think, given a simple no wait state bitmap.