Category: Vintage

John Morris has announced that he is now taking orders for the 2nd run of the Applesauce Floppy Drive Controller.  The Applesauce FDC allows users to digitally image their floppy disks (both personal and commercial) in the original format of the disk as it was created.  These disk images are then stored in WOZ format (an emulator format), DSK format (old emulator format) or as a raw or A2R file. Built into the Applesauce FDC Software is support for both…

When Hackaday held their Supercon, they gave electronic badges to all of the attendees.   Well, this in turn has produced a number of hacks and additions, including this one which caught out eye — An Apple-1 Emulator running on the badge https://hackaday.io/project/3620-l-star-software-defined-6502-computer/log/155608-l-star-as-a-supercon2018-badge-add-on

The Apple II floppy emulator options have been shrinking lately, with availability being limited to a few devices. From the CFFA 3000 last run to most other devices deprecated, there’s only two or three available right now. That’s why KbooHK coming into the Apple II community is quite welcome, and their product promises a great deal by supporting the new .Woz file format. The Wdrive is a small device, very well designed and built, It is a real floppy replacement…

Glenn Jones of A2RetroSystems announced that Pre-orders for the new Uthernet II cards for the Apple IIe and IIgs were being taken in an email to the Uthernet mailing list.  The new cards, according to the website are based on the Wiznet W5100 chip. It has an embedded hardware IP stack. Contiki, IP65, Marinetti and ADTPro have been updated to work with the new card. While actual fulfillment of the cards is expected in mid to late October, the cards…

John Morris has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of the Applesauce Floppy Disk Controller client software.   Applesauce FDC client version 1.05 will add a myriad of fixes and enhancements including: New disk visualization system. Better performance and the output file sizes are 30% of what they used to be. PNG files now also contain metadata. Fast Imager has undergone a significant upgrade. It will now allow for light copy protections, like volume number changes and E7 bitstream,…

Denis Molony has released a new version of the Apple II Disk Browser.  The latest update to the popular disk browsing utility includes updates to the graphics handling within the program.  You can download Version 1.0.28 of the Apple II Disk Browser JAR from the Disk Browser github releases page at: https://github.com/dmolony/DiskBrowser/releases

Ewan Wannop has released an update for the Spectrum Platinum communications suite for the Apple IIgs.  Version 2.5.5 includes a number of new features. Prior to Kansasfest, Ewan released his toolset, The Undo Manager, which according to Ewan was his pre-Kaansasfest offering to the community. The Undo Manager is a tool which according to Ewan,  adds 32 levels of Undo and Redo to your LineEdit, TextEdit, or Picture controls. To activate Undo and Redo Menu Items, simply install the Undo…

Denis Molony has announced an interim update to allow WOZ format disk images to be recognized by DiskBrowser as raw files.  Version 1.0.27 is now available from the DiskBrowser website at: https://github.com/dmolony/DiskBrowser/releases

Denis Molony has announce the immediate availability of version 1.0.26 of his Apple II DiskBrowser program. DiskBrowser is a Java based browsing program which allows users to view the contents of their Apple II disk images in native formats. DiskBrowser supports all of the popular disk image formats including John Morris’s WOZ format disk images.  It also includes all of the main program and operating system formats. This update to DiskBrowser completes the move to Java 10 for the Application.  …

Gerard Putter, creator and curator of Virtual II the emulator, has announced a new version of the software.   Virtual II is the premier Apple II emulator for Mac OS X and has been consistently updated for more than 10 years now. Version 8.5 was released today with a host of patches and fixes including: Added Dark Mode support for macOS 10.14 (Mojave). Woz disk image files are now shown correctly (enabled) in the disk open panel. Reading an empty diskette…

For those of you who have been following the A2osX project, there is now a new version of the Source and Build floppies available for download from the A2osX Github repository. The brainchild of Rémy Gibert, A2osX aims to be a multitasking operating system for the Apple II much like Linux or other Unix type operating systems. If you are interested in helping with this project, developers who are familiar with this type of operating system development are welcome to…

Charity Buzz is currently auctioning off one of the original Apple-1 Computers.  The “Duston 2” as this Apple-1 is being named, was previously owned by Adam Duston of Naperville Illinois. One of the original Byte Shop machines, the “Duston 2” has been modified slightly but according to Apple-1 restorer and expert, Corey Cohen, is not in bad physical condition and he gave it a 7.0 rating, stating that “the board would have been an 8,5 had it been all original….

I recently had the opportunity to beta test the new ReactiveMicro Apple IIc Plus Universal Power Supply, and it’s a beauty! The Apple IIc Plus was the last version of the already popular portable version of the Apple II. It featured a 4 MHz processor, expandable memory, internal 3.5 floppy drive, and new serial connectors. But the best feature was the lack of “brick on a leash” that plagued the original //c. This gave this model the freedom and portability…

For many years, Brutal Deluxe’s Antoine Vignau has been running the Apple II Cassette  Repository, a site dedicated to gathering all of the Apple II software distributed on cassette tape.  With the additions to the site this week, the repository has reached a whopping 670 entries. The latest addition to the site includes Confrontation by GRT Corporation.  Antoine has also made a short how-to guide available which takes you through the steps required to recover the data from old Apple…

The Vintage Geek Blog has a nice write up on BBSing with the WiModem-232 OLED.   If you were wondering about the WiModem 232 or how to get started, the Vintage Geek takes you through the gamut of the setup and connecting with a series of easy to understand photos. Check it out on the Vintage Geek Blog at: https://vintagegeek.wordpress.com/

Over the past year or so, Remy Gibert has been working on a multi-tasking operating system for the Apple II.  The system, which appears to be much like Unix / Linux, is well into development with a good portion of the system completed.  The goal of A2osX as Remy has named his fledgling operating system is to create: a cooperative, event-driven multitasking kernel (meaning it is applications that are responsible to give back control to kernel) Its principal goal is…

For those of you who have suffered long with the old version of Apple Commander, your cries have been answered. AppleCommander 1.4.0, which allows users to manipulate Apple II Disk images, has now been released.   According to the new GitHub page, changes in the new package include: We migrated from SourceForge to GitHub. This updates the boot code to point that out. AppleCommander would hang in an infinite loop if a directory wrapped in on itself. Thanks to @Lisias! Fixed…

Joshua Bell, creator of the online version of the Applesoft and Logo interpreters and curator of Calormen.com, has a new project.  The project, with full sources on GitHub, is a complete disassembly of the program known as Apple II Desktop or MouseDesk by Version Soft. According to the Apple II Desktop repository readme, The goal of this project is to disassemble/reverse-engineer the suite with an eye towards understanding how it functions, and eventually fixing bugs and adding functionality. While, Joshua…

R&D Automation LLC has put the CFFA 3000 card on sale once again.  Run # 5, totaling 1000 units is expected to go fairly quickly judging from the demand for it. The CFFA 3000 Card which allows users to use compact flash and USB drives to emulate hard drives and floppy drives with real Apple II series hardware, is being sold on the R&D automation website for $174.95 for just the bare card and $374.95 for a completely ready to…

David Schmenk has updated the PLASMA disk images.   For those of you who have been running on the original version 1.0 floppy disk images, you will want to download the new disks.  Included in this update are a number of Keyboard related updates for both the Apple II and the Apple III version of the programming environment. To download PLASMA, Check out the GitHub page at: https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA