Came here to mention Beagle Bros. In particular, for this:
> Other than AppleSoft BASIC (which was written by Microsoft! For Apple!!), which is burned into a ROM chip on the Apple II, there's also some sort of built-in assembler that you can access by typing this into the BASIC prompt:
CALL-151
> I believe this is where I'll be able to do some of the more Commodore 64-like peeking and poking directly at memory. I have a feeling there's a lot of exploring (and fun) to be done here. I need to read up more on this.
Unfortunately, I can never find the big compendium they produced, vaguely recalled as a brown legal sized paperback with their logo on the front and chock full of everything.
This is available and good tho:
Assembly Lines
"... designed for students of all ages: the nostalgic programmer enjoying the retro revolution, the newcomer interested in learning low-level assembly coding, or the embedded systems developer using the latest 65C02 chips...
Beagle Bros was one of my favorite things when I was a teenager. I had the peeks and pokes poster (http://beagle.applearchives.com/the_posters/poster_2.html) among others up on my wall and used GPLE (an editor) which was really nice. What I alwayss liked was their "Style" (old barbershop) and jokes.
Now I have an Apple IIe right next to my work computer (Floppy Emu). I connected it to a linux terminal and was able to do text Google searches and the SERP still renders fine at 80x24.
These all look great (esp. Pinball Construction Set!).
Regarding 6502 programming, I've been planning to follow along with Ben Eater's new course and kit on "Building a 6502 Computer": https://eater.net/6502 (once I finish up his previous kit for building an 8 bit computer with breadboards). Amazing that you still have those books in your library!
Those look very cool! Though FWIW I wonder if there are differences between the breadboard memory space and IO and busses and the Apple II. I recall the graphics screen was fed from RAM at 2000-3fff, with an offscreen buffer in 4000-5fff. And there was a vertical blanking interrupt handler to hook into, so you could organize writes to screen memory when it was not being read by the video machinery, and avoid flicker. Getting that working as a kid- actually seeing butter smooth non-flicker animation in the simple games I was writing- big, big moment.
The Apple ][ hardware did not have a direct way to track vertical blanking. There were hacks that used artifacts in the dynamic memory refresh to sniff out when the VBI was happening.
Ah, thank you, that's interesting. I don't recall puzzling through that exact machinery.
But I had a IIe, not a II, and looking at resources for that- yeah, I had a rev B motherboard, and remember well working in the double hi res context, both black and white and color:
Haven't seen Beagle Bros mentioned. Their awesome catalogs:
https://stevenf.com/beagle/contents.html
Also haven't seen mentioned Pinball Construction Set- an absolutely amazing piece of engineering, by Bill Budge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set
Last I checked, Budge was still working- for Google- on the V8 runtime. Think he is on twitter.
And while there are a lot of 6502 assembly resources around online, fondly remembered books on 6502 assembly and graphics programming (still have em):
https://www.amazon.com/High-resolution-Graphics-Animation-As...
https://books.google.com/books/about/Hi_res_Graphics_for_the...
Super cool memories from my childhood.