Alastair wrote:Jacob, I don't know why you would consider it sacrilegious as the Apple II is both older and not as advanced as the C64.
Well, I suppose it's because so many people hold it in high esteem. That said, I've always found it odd that the Apple II emulation scene is so relatively small compared to what is available for some of the more obscure European machines (Oric, anyone?)
Yes, graphically and sonically the C64 had the edge over the Apple II, still, the latter ran highly advanced games like Trinity and the rest of the Infocom range. I guess the ever knowledgeable Crawford's remark hits the bullseye. As Marco writes, the Apple machines were expensive and so there wasn't the same amount of geeks being able to experiment on it. And geeks does make the world go around
I think the C64 lasted a lot longer than anyone expected because the hordes of users kept finding new, odd hardware bugs that could be exploited for various programming gains. I'm sure that the Apple II could have been pushed further, too.
I've never had any experience with the IIGS, but I'll check it out. As for its lack of backwards-compability, I think that was a problem with more or less every machine released in the 80s
