The idea of using the Apple II home computer for digital photography purposes may seem somewhat daft considering that this is not a purpose that they were ever designed for, yet this is the goal that [Colin Leroy-Mira] had, requiring some image decoder optimizations. That said, it’s less crazy than one might assume at first glance, considering that the Apple II was manufactured until 1993, while the Apple QuickTake digital cameras that [Colin] wanted to use for his nefarious purposes saw their first release in 1994.
These QuickTake cameras feature an astounding image resolution of up to 640×480, using 24-bit color. Using the official QuickTake software for Apple Macintosh System 7 through 9 the photographs in proprietary QTK format could be fetched for display and processing. Doing the same on an Apple II would obviously require a bit more work, not to mention adapting of the image to the limitations of the 8-bit Apple II compared to the Motorola 68K and PowerPC-based Macs that the QuickTake was designed to be used with.
Targeting the typical ~1 MHz 6502 CPU in an Apple II, the dcraw QTK decoder formed the basis for an initial decoder. Many memory and buffer optimizations later, an early conversion to monochrome and various other tweaks later – including a conversion to 6502 ASM for speed reasons – the decoder as it stands today manages to decode and render a QTK image in about a minute, compared to well over an hour previously.
Considering how anemic the Apple II is compared to even a budget Macintosh Classic II system, it’s amazing that displaying bitmap images works at all, though [Colin] reckons that more optimizations are possible.
Is this part of QT library? It should run on modern PCs too.
Don’t think so. That QT I think stands for “QuickTime”, the video framework used by Apple at those times.
This would have made sense for SSTV, at the very least.
The ZX Spectrum, for example, was used as an SSTV decoder/encoder in the 80s.
Just look for the G1FTU SSTV software.
Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPIoIiMzJ7E
Somewhere in a box is my Computereyes gadget for my Apple ][ as shown here: http://www.digital-vision-inc.com/productCEAppleII.htm
We had the slightly later computereyes for IIGS in the art room at school when I was in 5th grade about 1988. It could sorta do color but even the IIG’s color capability was pretty limited. But it was a way you could take a “picture”, draw on it in Pantworks Plus and print on the ImageWriter. Pretty novel at the time.
Cool! I wonder how much an Apple IIgs could do with QuickTake images.
there was an Apple II “camera” product based on a Byte article using a ceramic package DRAM that had been “uncapped”, stuffed in a box with a lens focused on the chip die
it used a custom interface card, was slow to read, had low resolution, used Floyd-Stienberg dithering to display
it was expensive, clunky, but way cool!