Apple II Maniac Mansion: Poorly emulated or just plain ugly?

sanguinehearts · Post by **sanguinehearts** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 5:20 pm

Hi Forumites,
Ive been discussing the Apple II port of Maniac Mansion with a fellow IRC'er for the last hour or so.

It seems that Maniac Mansion for the Apple II has some graphical 'issues' when running under all(?) emulators, resulting in the graphics that would be better viewed with 3D glasses.

Now these images were clearly taken through the use of an emulator.

Its unclear if this port of MM was really that bad on the actual hardware.
Perhaps its using some unsupported graphics mode... or perhaps it really is awful.

ScummVM supports this version to some degree and it certainly does a good job displaying the graphics in a way that looks right to me

It seems that MM APPLE II and MM C64 are both SCUMM V0, and its known that the C64 version was the first version. so perhaps they had to do some nasty things to port it.

Does anybody remember MM on the Apple II?

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 8:08 pm

I never had an Apple II myself, but I've read there were technical limitations which made it impossible to mix colours freely on the screen. (Wikipedia says its hi-res graphics mode was "peculiar even by the standards of the day", though I find the article hard to follow.)

My guess is that it probably looked better on the monitors used back then. Sharper images aren't always a blessing.

Red_Breast · Post by **Red_Breast** » Sun Nov 29, 2009 6:03 pm

eriktorbjorn wrote: My guess is that it probably looked better on the monitors used back then. Sharper images aren't always a blessing.

That's true. Sometimes when I play old games I use an old 15 inch Dell CRT monitor with a Trinitron tube that came with a PC my mother got around the time Windows 95 was released.

Inwards · Post by **Inwards** » Fri Dec 04, 2009 3:25 pm

MM for the Apple II uses Double Hires. This only looked reasonably decent on older composite monitors. Even later Apple II models that used RGB monitors tended to make 8-bit Apple II games look like crap. The reason for this is that most native Apple II games relied on (or compensated for) colour bleeding to create colours that the system could not display otherwise. Most emulators do not reproduce this bleeding correctly. The one that does the best job is "Apple In PC". If you play MM with that it will look better, if a bit fuzzy.

Personally, I think this is part of the charm of the system, but I can understand why it would drive newer users to distraction.

sanguinehearts · Post by **sanguinehearts** » Fri Dec 04, 2009 5:42 pm

Inwards, thanks for your comprehensive reply

Im struggling to find a download for the apple in pc emulator.
Ive tried all combinations of searches I can think of. The original site seems to have died

EDIT: Ive managed to find a site which is still hosting the source for Apple in PC, if anybody is interested its here
http://kldp.net/projects/appleinpc/

sanguinehearts · Post by **sanguinehearts** » Fri Dec 04, 2009 7:54 pm

Well, there really is quite a difference between the display of Apple in PC and the display of AppleWin

petr · Post by **petr** » Sat Dec 05, 2009 11:55 am

Here is a binary of Apple in PC v0.1.25: http://web01.inwards.com/~inwards/cruft/aipc.zip