Apple II graphics formats

Modern-day computer users are used to standardized, platform-neutral graphic formats with built-in compression. Apple II graphic formats were nothing like that.

Rather, any saved graphics on the Apple II series of computers, particularly from the earlier days of that platform, were likely to be in a format that was highly specific to the (rather quirky) graphic modes of that machine. Perhaps it would be a raw dump of the graphic memory (which, in the Apple DOS filesystem, would be tagged as "B" for "binary file", but since Apple II users were not generally in the habit of using file extensions, there was nothing specific to indicate it was a graphical screenshot or in which graphic mode it was), or maybe some program-specific system of slicing or compressing the graphic, but in any case it was based directly on the way graphics were stored on the Apple. Apple themselves basically threw up their hands (or maybe just threw up) on the question of how one might convert Apple II graphics to a more modern platform. The best they could come up with was to find a program that can load the original image and save it out in something more standardized like GIF, but they couldn't actually come up with a specific program name. Presumably some of them existed at some point; the later stages of Apple II history, such as with the IIgs, overlapped the era of BBSing and GIFs. There must have been some art program that bridged the gap, and perhaps somebody will add more info about it to this article.

Lots of Apple software avoided the whole issue of graphic file saving by rendering the graphics real-time in code, something that could be done if it was mostly simple line art which could be built in vector form.

Anyway, to make some sense of Apple graphic files, then, you need to know something about how the graphic modes were implemented.

Links

 * Wikipedia article on Apple II graphics