Recently I’ve gotten into a little synthwave electronic music, listening in the evenings to enjoy a nice drifty, nostalgic vibe. I’ve got Hue color lighting and a couple of LED arrays (from Divoom) to show pics and anims down in the basement Byte Cellar to help set the mood. I’ve also got five desks full of computers and displays arrayed around the room…and it occurred to me that getting a few retro wave slideshows running down there would add to the vibe considerably, especially given the number of lovely, glowing-phosphor CRTs in the mix.
So, I started with the Apple IIe.
The enhanced 128K Apple IIe is capable of displaying “double high-resolution” graphics in 16 colors. (The Apple //c and IIgs support this mode, as well.) Only a relatively small percentage of software for the Apple II supports this mode, including games like King’s Quest (and many other Sierra games), Airheart, Rampage, etc. Dazzle Draw was a very popular 16-color drawing program that utilized this mode, as well. The programs that use this mode have an effective color resolution of 140×192 but, as all pre-IIgs Apple II graphics use NTSC artifacting to generate color, there’s some “play” in the technique, and several recent software applications written to convert modern images to the Apple II are able to generate DHGR images that could not be easily drawn or pixel-arted on the II with any of the tools available back in the day. I discussed these modern converters in several posts (linked at the end of this one) and used one of the tools I discussed, tohgr (macOS & Windows), to convert the set of images I wanted for the slideshow.
I was pleased with the results of the converted images I had chosen and put as many as would fit into a standard 800K disk image file (the size of a ProDOS 3.5-inch floppy disk) along with auto-booting slideshow software. In the end, there are 45 images in total, including the vibey rainbow Apple logo image from the 2022 “Peek Performance” event that I converted and discussed earlier (linked below).
Grab the disk image and feel the vibe on your own Apple II! (CRT definitely recommended…)
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