But for the outstanding design experience that Apple offers, and the courage to push its user base towards innovation and technology, the Apple MacBook Pro certainly deserves an ovation. Graphic designers will find AMD Radeon Pro Graphics and the high-resolution screen a pleasure to work with. Apple products and graphic design Asking Question (Rule 7) I've heard this sentiment echoed a few times in the past few years- i.e that graphic designers typically prefer to purchase Apple products because the inbuilt software facilitates their jobs (i.e graphic editing, video editing, etc.). Peculiarity of graphics modes. The graphic modes of the Apple II series were peculiar even by the standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s. One notable peculiarity of these modes is a direct result of Apple founder Steve Wozniak's chip-saving design.
- Apple Graphic Designers
- Apple Graphic Design Apps
- Apple Graphic Design
- Apple Graphic Designer Salary
- Apple Graphic Design Program
Are you looking for Best Free Graphic Design Software? You have landed at the right place! Here you will get to explore some of the top free graphic design software for beginners as well as experienced persons.
In this artistic design sphere, millions of graphics are created every day. So, you surely want to stand out and outshine from the rest of the crowd.
No doubt, the premium graphic design softwarecome packed with interesting and eye catching features that you won't get in a free version. But, paid packagesdon't fit in everyone's budget especially when you are running a startup or building a new career in designing graphics. This is when these free graphic design software come to our rescue without putting burden on our pockets.
When your team grows and you can well manage its cost, then you must anyways think to move on. You can switch towards the premium or paid apps that can offer wonderful and enhanced designing benefits.
These free graphic tools will make you present your artistic self in a unique and an innovative way. You will love to use these best free graphic design software and end up creating some really fascinating graphic designs.
These graphic design tools are not listed in any particular order. Each one is unique in its own particular way to help you develop stunning visuals.
So, here we present to you an exclusive list of10 Best Free Graphic Design Software for you to go through. Select the one that suits your requirements.
10 Best Free Graphic Design Software:
1. Canva:
Canva is an amazing free web based app. In fact, one of the best free graphic design software for beginners as well as professionals. It is really easy and simple to use. A perfect graphic design tool that brings some really sophisticated designing abilities for its users.
Key Features of Canva:
- Easy to use drag and drop features.
- Thousands of beautiful and professional layouts to choose from.
- A great selection of fonts to make your graphic look amazing.
- Plenty of free icons,shapes and elements to design your graphics.
- Free photos to add to your graphics. There are some paid photos and icons to use, but that too quite reasonable at 1 USD only.
- It helps you create stunning images, infographics, presentations and social media graphics in an elegant style.
Canva is a common choice, when it comes to selecting the Best free graphic design software. The simplicity of its tools and the growing number of features are attracting a whole lot of users towards it.
For further details, don't miss to checkout our exclusive post: Canva Review: Best Free Graphic Design Software
2. Vectr:
Vectr is another best free graphic design software available in web app as well as desktop app. So, you can use it online or download it for free. You can freely and easily make good presentations, logos, cards, mockups and 2D graphics etc. with this free and easy to use graphic editor.
Key Features of Vectr:
- Helps you create simple and clean vector graphics.
- It is easily understandable graphic design tool.
- Plenty of options like fonts, shadows, filters etc.
- A handy graphic tool for the ones getting started with vector graphics.
- Great live collaboration and synchronisation features i.e. you can share your work with anyone and anywhere.
3. SVG-Edit:
Scalable Vector Graphics commonly known as SVG-Edit is a online open source graphic software. There is no need to install any additional software for it. You can easily design or edit the SVG elements. SVG-Edit is a powerful graphic tool built on CSS3, Javascript and HTML 5.
In case you are thinking to reproduce your vector drawings programmatically, SVG-Edit is the perfect way to do it. You can freely edit and create documents. You can also download the code and make it work as per your requirements.
Key Features of SVG-Edit:
- Fee hand drawings, lines, shapes like lines, circles, squares, ellipses etc.to create great vector designs.
- Resizeable canvas to put your imagination into beautiful designs.
- Background settings, draggable dialogs, resizeable SVG icons and so on.
- Stylish text, images and color gradient picker.
- Different configurable options and numerous other features to create some great designs as per your needs.
This helps you create two dimensional vector graphics in a simplified manner. Moreover, these days web browsers are quite capable of displaying SVG just like GIF,PNG or JPEG files.
4. Inkscape:
Inkscape is yet another powerful free graphic design tool .A great alternative to Adobe Illustrator, Freehand or Corel Draw. This open source graphic tool is available for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
You can use this tool for creation of logos, illustrations and graphics that require high scalability. It is widely used tool and that too totally free of cost. This is a preferred choice amongst different marketing, branding, graphics industries.
Key Features of Inkscape:
- It has a good Scalable Vector Graphics or SVG integration and it supports SVG as its primary file format.
- It comes with advanced features like alpha transparency support, markers, clones, embedded bitmaps etc.
- Flexible drawing and text tools to create impressive vector imagery.
- User friendly and a clear interface make this graphic tool a good choice.
- It suits designers of all kinds for establishing professional grade designs as needed.
You may also like to checkout our popular blog post: Best Free Software for PC: Top List
5. Paint.net:
Paint.net is a simple yet powerful free image and photo editing software for your computer that runs on Windows. An easy to use tool that offers basic as well as some advanced features to create impressive designs of your choice.
Key Features of Paint.net:
- A windows based tool helpful in photo editing with powerful editing options.
- A wide range of special effects to give a beautiful look to your designs.
- A whole range of selection tools, support for layers and adjustments.
- A good alternative to Photoshop, Microsoft Photo editor and GIMP etc.
Paint.net is a basic graphic design software but is widely used due to its user friendly and simplistic features.
6. Easel.ly:
Easel.ly is another powerful web based tool especially for designing infographics. Even if you are a newbie, it shall be quite easy for you to use it. A number of free infographic templates plus shapes and objects shall help you create some good and visually appealing infographics in a short span of time.
Key Features of Easel.ly:
- A great user friendly tool for beginners at no cost.
- You can create and share visuals online in an easy manner.
- Customizable fonts, colors, text styles and sizes etc.
- A wide variety of editing options to customize your design in your own unique way.
7. Google Chart:
Google chart is a free tool offered by Google developers that allows you to create graphs and charts from various data. These graphs/charts can be easily inserted into a webpage or spreadsheets.
Key Features of Google chart:
- A user friendly graphic design software to create and customize your graphs and charts.
- You can easily create your data representation visuals like interactive pie charts, area charts, hierarchical tree maps etc.
- Easy to embed these charts/graphs into your webpage.
- A great tool for web developers to visualise data on their website free of cost.
8. Infogr.am:
Infogr.am is another free graphic online tool to create visuals and infographics as desired. You also get access to a whole range of charts,graphs and maps etc.
Key Features of Infogr.am:
- You can create cool infographics for free.
- You can upload pictures and videos also.
- Customization takes place in excel style spreadsheet giving a perfect look to the infographic created.
- You can publish your design at the Infogram website or embed it on your own website.
Apple Graphic Designers
A great way to create stunning charts and infographics to impress your audience. Moreover, it's all possible without spending any money.
You may also like: Canva Alternatives: 5 Best Similar Graphic Design Software!
9. Blender:
Blender is a free,open source and probably one of the best 3D Graphic software. It is freely available on different platforms like Windows, Linux and Mac. It has been specially designed to create interactive 3D applications, animated films, video games, 3D art and anything related to 3D content creation.
Key Features of Blender:
- A free 3D graphics program to create 3D visual effects.
- Photo realistic rendering that offers real time viewport preview.
- Easy customization and flexible interface add to its advantages.
- Its fast UV unwrapping, 3D modelling, fast rigging, texturing, impressive animations and amazing simulations are the major highlights.
- It comes loaded with a number of extensions and editing features to develop mesmerizing 3D graphics to appeal your viewers.
You may also like: Best Free 2D Animation Software for Beginners!
10. Daz Studio:
No matter what are your skill levels, if you are fond of learning 3D animation designing, you must visit Daz studio. This 3D animation tool helps you build your own virtual world using virtual props, accessories, places, animals, environment etc. Just go ahead and enhance your 3D skills by creating digital animations and illustrations.
Key Features of Daz Studio:
- It suits artists of all levels and even beginners interested in 3D models and 3D animations.
- A top graphic design tool that is easy to use and loaded with a variety of customization features.
- Real time rendering and photo realistic results are the main highlights for users of Daz studio.
- You can create custom 3D animations, 3D avatars and graphic designs, short films, illustrations for books. A lot more to do here.
11. GetStencil App:
We came to know of Stencil App from our friends and family. At the first look, it seems like a great tool. We will keep updating about it as we try and explore it further. In the meantime, Stencil has got a free account as well, do give it a try !!
If you like it, you can checkout the premium version of GetStencil App that has some really interesting features to help you create stunning visuals.
This was our list of Best free graphic design software for you to checkout this season. Don't wait! Come up with some stunning visuals.
If you are a graphic designer, a web developer or even an amateur who wants to learn and enter the graphic world, this might solve your purpose. And all the bloggers out there looking for exclusive blogging tips, placing some cool infographics on your blog is a great way to please your visitors. These graphic design applications shall be quite useful in creating some great images and infographics.
So, here we have shortlisted only some of the Best free graphic design software. The list is a bit longer. Best apple mechanical keyboard. There are various other free graphic design software that can be added to it like:
- Pixlr
- GIMP
- Drawplus starter edition
- Sumo Paint
- Vizualize
- Sculptris
Are you also preparing for a designer interview? If yes, you may also be interested in Best Graphic Design Interview Questions.
Have you used any of the tools from our list of Best free graphic design software? Are you planning to try any of these free graphic design software?Do share your views and experiences on the same in the comment section.
The Apple II graphics were composed of idiosyncratic modes and settings that could be exploited. This graphics system debuted on the original Apple II, continued with the Apple II Plus and was carried forward and expanded with the Apple IIe, Enhanced IIe, IIc, IIc Plus and IIGS.
Peculiarity of graphics modes[edit]
The graphic modes of the Apple II series were peculiar even by the standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s. One notable peculiarity of these modes is a direct result of Apple founder Steve Wozniak's chip-saving design. Many home computer systems of the time (as well as today's PC-compatible machines) had an architecture which assigned consecutive blocks of memory to non-consecutive rows on the screen in graphic modes, i.e., interleaving.[citation needed] Apple's text and graphics modes are based on two different interleave factors of 8:1 and 64:1.
A second peculiarity of Apple II graphics—the so-called 'color fringes'—is yet another by-product of Wozniak's design. While these occur in all graphics modes, they play a crucial role in Hi-Resolution or Hi-Res mode (see below).
Video output on the machines[edit]
Reading a value from, or writing any value to, certain memory addresses controlled so called 'soft switches'. The value read or written does not matter, what counts is the access itself. This allowed the user to do many different things including displaying the graphics screen (any type) without erasing it, displaying the text screen, clearing the last key pressed, or accessing different memory banks. For example, one could switch from mixed graphics and text to an all-graphics display by accessing location 0xC052 (49234). Then, to go back to mixed graphics and text, one would access 0xC053 (49235).
Built-in video output hardware[edit]
All Apple II machines featured an RCA jack providing a rough NTSC, PAL, or SECAMcomposite video output (on non-NTSC machines before the Apple IIe this output is black-and-white only). This enabled the computer to be connected to any composite video monitor conforming to the same standard for which the machine was configured. However the quality of this output was unreliable; the sync signalling was close enough for monitors—which are fairly forgiving—but did not conform closely enough to standards to be suitable for broadcast applications, or even input to a video recorder, without intervening processing. (The exception was the Extended Back version of the Bell & Howell branded black II Plus, which did provide proper video sync, as well as other media oriented features.)
In addition to the composite video output jack, the IIc, IIc Plus, and the IIGS featured a two-row, 15-pin output. In the IIc and IIc Plus, this connector was a special-purpose video connector for adapters to digital RGB monitors and RF modulators. In the IIGS it was an output for an analog RGB monitor specially designed for the IIGS.
Add-on video output cards[edit]
Numerous add-on video display cards were available for the Apple II series, such as the Apple 80-Column Text Card. There were PAL color cards which enabled color output on early PAL machines. Some other cards simply added 80-column and lowercase display capabilities, while others allowed output to an IBM CGA monitor through a DE9 output jack.
Graphics mode details[edit]
Color on the Apple II[edit]
The Apple II video output is really a monochrome display based upon the bit patterns in the video memory (or pixels). These pixels are combined in quadrature with the colorburst signal to be interpreted as color by a composite video display.
High resolution provides two pixels per colorburst cycle, allowing for two possible colors if one pixel is on, black if no pixels are on, or white if both pixels are on. By shifting the alignment of the pixels to the colorburst signal by 90°, two more colors can be displayed for a total of four possible colors. Low resolution allows for four bits per cycle, but repeats the bit pattern several times per low resolution pixel. Double high resolution also displays four pixels per cycle. See the sections below for more details.
Low-Resolution (Lo-Res) graphics[edit]
Apple Graphic Design Apps
The blocky, but fast and colorful Lo-Res graphics mode (often known as GR after the BASIC command) was 40 pixels wide, corresponding to the 40 columns on the normal Apple II text screen. This mode could display either 40 rows of pixels with four lines of text at the bottom of the screen, or 48 rows of pixels with no text. Thus two pixels, vertically stacked, would fill the screen real estate corresponding to one character in text mode. The default for this was 40×40 graphics with text.
There are 16 colors available for use in this mode (actually 15 in most cases, since the two shades of gray are identical in brightness on original Apple hardware, except on the Apple IIGS). Note that six of the colors are identical to the colors available in High-Resolution (Hi-Res) mode.
The colors were created by filling the pixel with a repeating 4-bit binary pattern in such a manner that each bit group fit within one cycle of the colorburst reference signal. Color displays would interpret this pattern as a color signal. On monochrome monitors, or if the colorburst signal was turned off, the display would reveal these bit patterns. There are two equivalent grey shades as 5 (0101) is equivalent to 10 (1010) based on how the colors mix together; the 'on' bits are polar opposites of each other on the quadrature color signal, so they cancel each other and display as grey.
This mode is mapped to the same area of memory as the main 40-column text screen (0x400 through 0x7FF), with each byte storing two pixels one on top of the other.
The Lo-Res graphics mode offered built-in commands to clear the screen, change the drawing color, plot individual pixels, plot horizontal lines, and plot vertical lines. There was also a 'SCRN' function to extract the color stored in any pixel, one lacking in the other modes.
| Number — name | Y | Pb (rel.) | Pr (rel.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 — black | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 — magenta | 0.25 | 0 | 0.5 |
| 2 — dark blue | 0.25 | 0.5 | 0 |
| 3 — purple | 0.5 | 1 | 1 |
| 4 — dark green | 0.25 | 0 | −0.5 |
| 5 — grey #1 | 0.5 | 0 | 0 |
| 6 — medium blue | 0.5 | 1 | −1 |
| 7 — light blue | 0.75 | 0.5 | 0 |
| 8 — brown | 0.25 | −0.5 | 0 |
| 9 — orange | 0.5 | −1 | 1 |
| 10 — grey #2 | 0.5 | 0 | 0 |
| 11 — pink | 0.75 | 0 | 0.5 |
| 12 — green | 0.5 | −1 | −1 |
| 13 — yellow | 0.75 | −0.5 | 0 |
| 14 — aqua | 0.75 | 0 | −0.5 |
| 15 — white | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Lo-Res memory layout[edit]
A block of 128 bytes stores three rows of 40 characters each, with a remainder of eight bytes left after the third row is stored. But these bytes are not left empty. Instead, they are used variously by motherboard firmware and expansion card firmware to store important information, mostly about external devices attached to the computer. This created problems when the user loaded a text or a lo-res graphics screen directly into video memory—replacing the current information in the holes with what was there at save-time. (Disk head recalibration was a common side-effect, when the disk controller found its memory—in a screen hole—of where the head was, suddenly not to match the header data of the track that it was reading). The programmers at Apple responded by programming ProDOS so the user could not directly load a file (screen data, or otherwise) into 0x400-0x7FF. ProDOS programs to properly load data to this portion of memory soon arose; several appeared in Nibble magazine.
Screen 2 Low-Resolution graphics and text[edit]
Having two screens for displaying video images was an integral part of the Apple II family design. Accessing memory location 0xC055 (49237) displayed 'Screen 2' regardless of how the other 'soft switches' were set. The text and Lo-Res Screen 2 space ranged from 0x800 (2048) to 0xBFF (3071). The interleaving is exactly the same as for the main screen ('Screen 1'). Applesoft BASIC programs are loaded at 801h (2049) by default; therefore, they will occupy the Text Screen 2 space unless the computer is instructed to load a program elsewhere in memory. By contrast, some commercial software programs for the Apple II used this memory space for various purposes — usually to display a help screen.
'Alternate Display Mode' on the Apple IIGS[edit]Unlike the other Apple II machine types, the Apple IIGS featured a processor (the 65816) which could address more than 64K of RAM without special tricks. In the IIgs, RAM was demarcated into banks of 64K. For example, bank 0xE0 consisted of the range 0xE00000 through 0xE0FFFF. The Apple IIgs had a chip called the 'Mega II' which allowed it to run most programs written for other Apple II computers. The IIgs architecture mapped the screen data to memory bank 0xE0. However, in IIe emulation mode, screen data was stored in bank 0x00. This presented a problem. The designers of the Mega II included routines to copy most screen data to bank 0xE0 to ensure that Apple IIe-specific programs worked properly. But they forgot about the rarely used Text Screen 2. This was not discovered until the Mega II chips had made it into the IIgs machines. So the firmware designers added a CDA (classic desk accessory—accessible from the IIgs Desk Accessories menu, invoked with Apple+Control+Escape) called 'Alternate Display Mode',[1] which, at the expense of a little bit of CPU time, performed the task for the few programs that needed it. It could be turned on and off at whim, but reverted to off upon resetting the computer.
Improved compatibility with Text Screen 2 was addressed with the introduction of the Apple IIGS with 1 megabyte of RAM (better known as the ROM 3) in 1989. The new motherboard provided hardware shadowing of Text Screen 2, at no cost to CPU time, therefore not affecting the speed of software running. Although Alternate Display Mode remained an option in the CDA menu, the machine would automatically detect the presence of Text Screen 2 and enabled hardware shadowing of Text Screen 2 into bank 0xE0 on ROM 3 machines.
High-Resolution (Hi-Res) graphics[edit]
When the Apple II came out, a new mode had been added for 280×192 high-resolution graphics. Like Lo-Res mode, hi-res mode had two screens; in Applesoft BASIC, either one could be initialized, using the commands HGR for the first screen or HGR2 for the second.
The Applesoft BASIC ROM contained routines to clear either of two Hi-Res screens, draw lines and points, and set the drawing color. The ROM also contained routines to draw, erase, scale and rotate vector-based shapes. There were no routines to plot bitmapped shapes, draw circles and arcs, or fill a drawn area, but many programs were written; many appeared in Nibble and other Apple II magazines.
The user could 'switch in' four lines of text in the Hi-Res mode, just like in Lo-Res mode; however, this hid the bottom 32 lines, resulting in a 280x160 picture. (The ROM routines could still modify the bottom, even though it was hidden.)
The Apple II's Hi-Res mode was peculiar even by the standards of the day. While the CGA card released four years after the Apple II on the IBM PC allowed the user to select one of two color sets for creating 320×200 graphics, only four colors (the background color and three drawing colors) were available at a time. By contrast, the Apple offered eight colors for high-resolution graphics (actually six, since black and white were both repeated in the scheme). Each row of 280 pixels was broken up into 40 blocks of seven pixels each, represented in a single byte. Each pair of adjacent pixels generated a single color pixel via artifact color, resulting in an effective resolution of 140×192. The lower seven bits of each byte represented the pixels, while the most significant bit controlled the phase offset for that block of pixels, altering the color that was displayed.
| High Bit | Pixel Pair | Color Number | Color Name | Y | Pb (rel.) | Pr (rel.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 00 | 0 | Black 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 01 | 1 | Green | 0.5 | −1 | −1 |
| 0 | 10 | 2 | Purple | 0.5 | 1 | 1 |
| 0 | 11 | 3 | White 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 00 | 4 | Black 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 01 | 5 | Orange | 0.5 | −1 | 1 |
| 1 | 10 | 6 | Blue | 0.5 | 1 | −1 |
| 1 | 11 | 7 | White 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
While this feature allows six colors onscreen simultaneously, it does have one unpleasant side effect. For example, if a programmer tried to draw a blue line on top of a green one, portions of the green line would change to orange. This is because drawing the blue line sets the MSB for each block of seven pixels in this case. 'Green' and 'orange' pixels are represented the same way in memory; the difference is in the setting (or clearing) of the MSB. Another side effect is that drawing a pixel required dividing by seven. (For the Apple's 6502 processor, which had no division hardware, dividing by seven was relatively slow. If drawing a pixel had only required dividing by a simple power of two, such as eight, this would have only needed a sequence of bit shifts, which would have been much faster.)
The Hi-Res mode on the Apple II was also peculiar for its 64:1 interleave factor. This was a direct result of Steve Wozniak's chip-saving design.[2] The 64:1 factor resulted in a 'Venetian blind' effect when loading a Hi-Res screen into memory from floppy disk (or sometimes RAM disk) with the soft switches already set. 'Screen holes' occur in the Hi-Res mode just as they do in the Lo-Res and text modes. Nothing was usually stored there—though they were occasionally used to store code in self-displaying executable pictures. Another notable exception is the Fotofile (FOT) format[3] inherited by ProDOS from Apple SOS, which included metadata in the 121st byte (the first byte of the first hole) indicating how it should be displayed (color mode, resolution), or converted to other graphics formats.
Finally, another quirk of Wozniak's design is that while any pixel could be black or white, only pixels with odd X-coordinates could be green or orange. Likewise, only even-numbered pixels could be violet or blue.[4] This is where the so-called 'fringe benefit' comes in. The Apple video hardware interprets a sequence of two or more turned-on horizontal pixels as solid white, while a sequence of alternating pixels would display as color. Similarly, a sequence of two or more turned-off horizontal pixels would display as black.
There was no built-in command to extract the color of a pixel on the Hi-Res screen, or even to determine whether it was on at all. Several programs to determine if a pixel was lit were written, and a program to extract the pixel's true color was published in the April 1990 edition of Nibble.
Just as there are two text screen pages (and two Lo-Res graphics pages), so there are also two Hi-Res pages, mapped one right after the other in memory. (The second Hi-Res screen was mapped to 0x4000-0x5FFF, or 16384-24575 in decimal.) IBM's CGA supported only one graphics page at a time. This simplified animation on the Apple II, because a programmer could display one page while altering the other (hidden) page.
Provided that the reset vector had not been occluded by an actively running program, invocation of Control+Reset would interrupt a program and escape to the monitor or Applesoft command prompt. The use of Control+Open-Apple+Reset would force a reset at the expense of a small amount of memory corruption. Creative configuration of some soft switches at the monitor or at the prompt enabled immediate viewing of images from interrupted programs. Favorite scenes from games could be then recorded. On the Apple //e and //c, use of Control+Open-Apple+Reset would result in the pattern 0xA0A0 being written sparsely across all memory, including Hi-Res pages 1 and 2 at $2000 – $5FFF. Corruption by these artifacts could be edited out using a paint package. On the enhanced Apple //e, Hi-Res video memory could be preserved without artifact by the following sequence: pressing Control+Closed-Apple+Reset, and feathering the Reset key up then down for a fraction of a second, repeating until the self-diagnostic color pattern began to fill the first line of text in the upper left corner. Since the self-diagnostic progressed from $0000 upward, once the beginning address of text page 1 ($400) was clobbered, so then was the checksum of the reset vector ($3F4), which meant that a subsequent rapid press of Control+Reset would force the firmware to reboot without clobbering memory above $0800 in either main or the auxiliary banks. It was possible to BSAVE these images to a floppy and create a slide show or a static image, because a soft reset did not clear the video memory on Hi-Res images.
Graphic modes on later models (IIe, IIc, IIc Plus, IIGS)[edit]
Soon after the introduction of the Apple IIe, the Apple engineers realized that the video bandwidth doubling circuitry used to implement 80-column text mode could be easily extended to include the machine's graphics modes. Since the signal was present at the auxiliary slot connector which housed the Extended 80 Column Card, Annunciator 3 on the game port was overloaded to activate double resolution graphics when both 80 column video and a graphics mode was selected. Replacement motherboards (called the Revision B motherboard) were offered free of charge to owners of the Apple IIe to upgrade their machines with double resolution graphics capabilities. For this reason, machines with the original Revision A motherboard are extremely rare. Subsequent Apple II models also implement the double resolution graphics modes.
Double Low-Resolution[edit]
This was an 80×40 (or 80×48) graphics mode available only on 80-column machines. Under Applesoft BASIC, enabling this mode required three steps. First, enabling 80 column mode with PR#3, Then enabling double-density graphics with POKE49246,0, followed by GR.
(Note that PR#3 is deferred to the operating system, with PRINTCHR$(4) to avoid disconnecting it from BASIC—for complicated reasons. This is followed by a PRINT command to send a null character, because the newly assigned output device doesn't get initialised until the first character is sent to it—a common source of confusion.)
Once this was done, the Double Lo-Res screen was displayed and cleared, and the PLOT, HLIN, and VLIN commands worked normally with the x coordinate range extended to 0 though 79. (Only the Apple IIc and IIgs supported this in firmware. Using double-lo-res mode from BASIC on a IIe was much more complicated without adding an & command extension to BASIC.)
There were two major problems when using this mode in Applesoft. First, once the mode was activated, access to the printer became complicated, due to the 80 column display firmware being handled like a printer. Second, the SCRN (pixel read) function did not work properly. Fortunately, there was a program in the March 1990 issue of Nibble that took care of this problem.
At least one commercially available BASICcompiler, ZBASIC from Zedcor Systems, was known to support Double Lo-Res graphics.
Double High-Resolution[edit]
The composition of the Double Hi-Res screen is very complicated. In addition to the 64:1 interleaving, the pixels in the individual rows are stored in an unusual way: each pixel was half its usual width and each byte of pixels alternated between the first and second bank of 64KB memory. Where three consecutive on pixels were white, six were now required in double high-resolution. Effectively, all pixel patterns used to make color in Lo-Res graphics blocks could be reproduced in Double Hi-Res graphics.
The ProDOS implementation of its RAM disk made access to the Double Hi-Res screen easier by making the first 8 KB file saved to /RAM store its data at 0x012000 to 0x013fff by design. Also, a second page was possible, and a second file (or a larger first file) would store its data at 0x014000 to 0x015fff. However, access via the ProDOS file system was slow and not well suited to page-flipping animation in Double Hi-Res, beyond the memory requirements.
Applications using Double High-Resolution[edit]Despite the complexities involved in programming and using this mode, there were numerous applications which made use of it. Double Hi-Res graphics were featured in business applications, educational software, and games alike. The Apple version of GEOS used Double Hi-Res, as did Brøderbund's paint program, Dazzle Draw. Beagle Bros provided a toolkit, Beagle Graphics, with routines for developing double hi-res graphics in AppleSoft BASIC. Numerous arcade games, and games written for other computers, were ported to the Apple II platform, and many took advantage of this graphics mode. There were also numerous utility programs and plug-in printer cards that allowed the user to print Double Hi-Res graphics on a dot-matrix printer or even the LaserWriter.
Apple IIGS graphics modes[edit]
The Apple IIGS features not only the graphics modes of its precursors, but several new modes similar to ones found on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.
See also[edit]
Apple Graphic Design
References[edit]
Apple Graphic Designer Salary
- ^Nibble, February 1992
- ^Nibble, July 1990
- ^Apple II File Type Notes: FTN.08.0000
- ^Nibble, December 1988, p. 66
Apple Graphic Design Program
