Apple II sprite boards

Mike wrote: They were the *best* in the industry for the price. (In 1977.) If they hadn't kept selling so darn well on their own (despite several attempts by Apple to kill them in the early 80s), Apple might have been forced to design better video into later models. The //e double-hires mode was too little too late. I used to have a neat product from Video Associate Labs (in Texas) called a VB3 Microkeyer. It was a pair of large boards, one of which plugged into an Apple ][ slot, and the other of which sat over the power supply. You had to remove about a dozen chips from the Apple ][ logic board, and run DIP jumper cables between the vacated sockets and corresponding sockets on the VB3 boards. It was a combination genlock, proc amp, and keyer. Unlike many of the later inexpensive genlocks, this one was engineered to produce high-quality output that was fully suitable for broadcast use. It also added a new hires mode in which the memory map was linear, rather than the strange interleave of the normal Apple video modes.