I incorporated Projected Imagery, Inc (Pi, Inc) in late 1977 or early 1978 which coincided with my entry into the laser show business in planetariums, corporate trade shows, numerous custom, product photo shoots, rock concerts and more. As I've posted in other posts on this forum, the projector(s) software and control equipment that I've built that were primarily used by myself, but later by a small, unique group of professional laser companies, two which have been long time members of this forum.
I coined the term AppleDAC but never trademarked it. I see now in this thread that there was another "AppleDAC" product. To me, it was just a dual DAC for my and other's Apple II/IIe's. There were four versions of my AppleDAC, the first had 13 ICs, the last had only 2. I paid a very modest fee (parts and a tiny amount for labor) for my brother and his friend to build and design the first AppleDAC and binary driver. The first images were plotted on 256 x 256 grid paper overlaid on artwork on a light table, and the 8-bit XY coordinate values typed into an Apple II's memory in Hex, then saved as binary files. I could make any image I wanted as long as it only took 128 XY pairs. I paid far more for a software programmer to write some custom software so that I could use the break-through Apple Graphics Tablet to speed up image creation and to re-designed the DAC driver software to add more feature versatility to it including image sizes up to 1024 XY pairs, image blanking, animation, rope-draw of images, adjusting image frame rates in real-time.
From having and owning all copyright and intellectual property rights to these initial, fundamental and functional software functions I learned to make future modifications and enhancements myself and through collaboration with a close EE engineer friend. The FBL (Final-Before-Last) version of hardware and software was the 4 65C02 co-processor quad DAC board, each with 24KB static RAM and 8KB of EPROM, all controlled under on Apple IIe with a Real-Time Clock, time based interrupt controller, where the principal purpose of the Apple IIe was to read disk data, upload image data to the 4 co-processor boards as needed, load and read text time-based script commands and send co-processor board commands to the 4 boards.
Update: I forgot to add that the Apple also provided scripted control of 24 projector binary control lines and 24 analog switching control lines in the console for XY summing and/or modulation signal assignment. These same controls functioned in manual mode. Each co-processor DAC board had 16 waveform shape tables and 16 waveform shape scaling tables.
Since the XY DAC board was the principal and key element for the display of digitized imaging, here are my DAC boards in sequence.
Version 1
Version2
Version3
FBL
In 2016, (and retirement) I had dug out my old laser stuff, bought a cheap 20K Chinese RGB projector, RGB diodes and 30K scanners with the intention of doing a DIY 30K projector and started modifying my Version 3 AppleDAC driver and Apple IIe software for RGB blanking and DAC inputting into an ILDA DB-25. I've provided an Apple II/IIe/IIgs enthusiast on this forum (icecruncher) a working set of Version 3 and the new RGB software updates.
Unfortunately, my co-processor DAC boards could not have it's single hardware blanking channel modified for RGB blanking without creating a new surface mount IC version of the board. (I'm mean hey, I need something to do in my 80's, right?)
Version 3 was used in quite a few rock concerts, including ZZ Top, Rick James, Triumph, and Michael Jackson's Victor Tour where I was honored to be "driving the two graphics lasers" for his six LA finale shows. photonbeam" posted in 2013 on this forum on how he took the "Woz" to see my Apple IIe laser graphics setup after one of the shows. (and in LA, that meant it was probably 4am in the morning, long after I was, uh, well hey, come on, it was LA in the mid 80's.)
All I can say is, I am very grateful to Ivan Dryer who brought this art form to my awareness, and to the public forefront and allowed me, as a result, to be a derivative player, playing a small part in this entertainment industry. Rock on, dudes!