From Alex Lee:
Ever wanted a convenient way to play all commercial IIGS games with little fuss? Like Total Replay but includes every genre of IIGS specific game as well as some demo examples pushing the G and the S in your sweet 16?
Look no more! If you’ve got a storage device that supports 7 smart port devices, like the CFFA3000, Micro Drive Turbo, CFFA 1 & 2, BOOTi, SCSI drives (but not the Floppy Emu) and an Apple IIGS with 1.25meg of RAM, you’re in luck! Go straight to News on ninjaforce.com.
What’s new since v0.7.0?
Now with more supported games:
- Skate or Die
- Test Drive II and all add-on disks pre-installed (thanks to Enrico Rolfi)
- Runaway Robots (thanks to Enrico Rolfi)
- GATE (thanks to qkumba)
- Space Shark (thanks to qkumba)
- Space Cluster (thanks to qkumba)
- Sensei (thanks to qkumba)
- Tower of Myraglen (thanks to qkumba)
- Bill Palmer
- F1 Race
- Chips and Dips
- Canal Meurtre
Game Demos:
- Sierra Games
- Space Fox
- Sword of Sodan
- Task Force
and Scene Demos:
- Blasters Apocalyptic Demo
- Digarok’s Happy Friday
- GS Underground Airforce, Demo 2, 3, 4, Xmas 91
- GS<>IRC Demo
- Jason Harper’s Fill Maze & Polgonia I
- John Stephen III’s SHKalid #1
- Mr Z & ACS’s Beam Demo
- Mr Z’s Synchro Cyclo Demo
- Ninja Force’s Plasma & XOAH
- Prince Slime’s Lower Planes BBS Demo
- Spy Network’s First Demo
- Teaser’s Before Light, Boink and RGB demos
- Zavtra’s Software Experiences 1 & 2
New features include :
- All titles that require joystick will let you know when you launch a title when you don’t have a joystick connected
- All titles that have issues on ROM3 will let you know when you run them on a ROM3.
Titles with compatibility issues with ROM3:
- War in Middle Earth (graphics glitches)
- Triango (menus don’t appear)
- Mancala (graphics glitches)
- Task Force (graphics glitches with an accelerator)
- Magic Johnson Basketball (fails to load)
- Pinball Wizard
- Runaway Robots
- Apple IIGS Sales Demo (fails to load)
Future Plans
- Graphical User Interface with control from keyboard, mouse or joystick.
- Improved slideshows with fading transitions and prevention of repeats of titles until all other titles shown
- Game Info screens that include publisher, developer, conversion info, as well as what control method to use and what the game’s about
- A curated Recommended list of titles that will be initial category viewed from main menu
- Favourites category, so you can put together your own list of titles for quick access
- Filter out titles that aren’t child friendly (Strip Poker II, Teenage Queen)
- Speed control – preselected speeds for best possible intended gameplay versus convenience of accelerators.
- In addition to the slideshow screen saver, hack various attract mode and demo versions of games to run and return to launcher UI after an appropriate amount of time has demonstrated gameplay.
- Cheat system like Total Replay, or using GameHacker CDA as a base.
- Possible expansion to include all IIGS specific educational wares in a separate multi-volume collection, and/or in addition to this gaming and scene demo collection.
Huge thanks to:
- @Jesse Blue of Ninja Force for his skilful coding, in his indomitable style, in creating a super quick custom boot and menu system, as well as a new build system and providing many other suggestions
- @Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe, @qkumba and @Enrico over many years for providing mass storage modified versions of games, apps and educational titles.
- @digarok for providing GitLab as a collaborative way to add to, modify and create organised builds of the project, and other advice.
- @fatdog for the peerless work on 3200 colour image mode conversions
- The many people over the years who have shared scans, boxed software, made disk images, provided digitised manuals, etc., all that has been done to preserve the unique software available to the Apple IIGS.
- Not to mention anyone who’s taken a punt on this platform and written or distributed software for it.
