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haha as someone who has spent a lot of time recently doing Apple II graphics coding, both for games, sizecoding, and the demoscene, let me tell you that the weird layout in fact is not easier to deal with.

You have to waste a lot of space on lookup tables, or else complex calculations. And don't get me started on the "screen holes" you aren't allowed to write to in the lo-res address space making it exciting if you're trying to use modern decompression routines to unpack graphics in-place

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dhosek 4 days ago | parent [-]

Hmm, I don’t remember there being anything special about those little 8-byte holes in the lo-res/text memory.

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lscharen 4 days ago | parent [-]

There are 8 screen hole bytes in the bottom 8 text rows (64 bytes total) and 8 expansions slots, so the screen hole byte at offset "N" was often used to store up to 8 bytes of data[1] (one byte in each of the rows' screen hole area) by the expansion card's firmware in Slot "N". Overwriting those bytes could result in system crashes and hardware hangs.

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/2541/3653

	▲	dhosek 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, I remember using the memory holes in the HIRES graphics memory for scratch-pad usage, but had forgotten about this part. I loved the Apple ][ since it (up to the //e) was capable of being fully understood by a single human being. Few if any computers since then have held that distinction