Call-A.P.P.L.E. Magazine Volume 36, Number 8 — August 2026

World’s Largest Apple User Group Magazine — Since 1978

Issue Summary

The August 2026 issue chases away the post-KansasFest blues with a full report on KansasFest 2026, the 38th annual gathering, held at the University of Illinois Springfield under the theme “Forty Years of Cortland,” complete with special guests, new hardware and software, and the Apple II Forever Awards. It is also a big month for A.P.P.L.E. releases. GS+ Magazine returns with Volume 8, Number 1, a 270-page new issue produced with founder Steve Disbrow, and Bill Martens presents version 2.0 of his remastered TREK3000 with its complete manual. Ultimore – Spaceship Crash also arrives for the Mac on A.P.P.L.E.’s rewritten Ultima III engine. Elsewhere, Ernst Krogtoft recounts the Thanksgiving walkout of 1981 at Automated Simulations and the final Dunjonquest title, Sorcerer of Siva. Andy Hertzfeld’s Apple Folklore visits the Mac’s earliest circuit boards, the Norse Wanderer BBS returns after 40 years, and a global calendar maps out September’s events. Rounding things out are RetroMacCast, an updated emulator rundown, Applesauce FDC 2.08, and the usual utility roundup.

Table of Contents

The Editor Still Bytes Back!
by The Editor (Bill Martens)
The editor celebrates getting A.P.P.L.E.’s apps back online after clearing Apple’s gatekeepers, including Structris, Ultima III, Ultimore, and What’s Where in the Apple, with new versions expected around October. He also introduces the issue’s coverage of the summer’s events, calls this year’s KansasFest one for the ages, and points readers to the A.P.P.L.E. store and bookstore for the month’s new releases.

Apple II Series Emulators: The Complete Rundown Updated
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
This no-favorites directory covers more than 50 Apple II series emulators, listing each project’s URL, author, and status. This edition adds AppleEm IIe, a new browser-based Apple IIe emulator, and updates the MAME, Mariani, and Virtual Apple ][ entries; Virtual Apple ][ has relaunched with a new in-browser emulator.

RetroMacCast Episode #739: A Free Macintosh
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
A recap of the RetroMacCast episode in which James and John share their latest eBay finds: an Apple employee “hello” pin, a Macintosh SE with a green CRT, and Dr. J’s Fat Mac. They also look at Apple 1 hardware emulators and cover news including the Apple2TS emulator, the Franken-Lisa project, and their own interview in Compute’s Gazette.

The Post-KansasFest Blues
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
A full report on KansasFest 2026, the 38th annual gathering, held July 14–19 at the University of Illinois Springfield under the theme “Forty Years of Cortland,” with an online encore on July 31 and August 1. Guests Jimmy Mensch, Dan Hillman, and Dan Kottke joined Kate Szkotnicki as Apple II Forever Award recipients. Session highlights include the final Lawless Legends beta, GSSquared and A.P.P.L.E.’s KEGS-JS, the A2VERA video card, and new IIGS games. The report also covers SolderFest, HackFest, a tornado-tested Garage Giveaway, and a remembrance of Rebecca “Burger Becky” Heineman.

TREK3000 — A Remastered Version of the Original TREK
by Bill Martens
Bill Martens presents TREK3000 in full manual form. It began as “Enhanced Trek,” written over two weekends in October 1985 as a pure-Applesoft, key-driven reworking of the classic Star Trek game. Version 2.0 completes it with an on-screen forward viewscreen showing torpedo flights and phaser fire, automated starbase docking, auto-locking torpedoes, starbase sieges, surrendering Klingons, and five difficulty levels with a Starfleet rank from Ensign to Admiral. Also included are gameplay guides, programming notes for porting to other 8-bit machines, and how to get the disk; the game requires a 48K Apple II with an 80-column card.

GS+ Magazine Returns: A.P.P.L.E. Publishes Volume 8, Number 1
by Brian Wiser / A.P.P.L.E. Staff
Brian Wiser announces GS+ Magazine Volume 8, Number 1, the first new issue in thirty years of the pioneering Apple IIGS magazine-plus-disk, produced in cooperation with founder Steve “Diz” Disbrow. The 270-plus-page full-color book pairs a new “Writer’s Block” editorial and a seven-page interview with Diz with all 37 original editorials, every disk README, program documentation, a complete glossary and indexes, and classic GS+ humor. It is available in paperback and hardback.

Ultimore — Spaceship Crash for the Macintosh
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
A.P.P.L.E.’s remakes of Joel Fenton’s Ultimore games, Ultimore: A World Divided and the new Ultimore Spaceship Crash, are built on A.P.P.L.E.’s rewritten LairWare Ultima III engine for the Mac. Betas run on macOS 14 or later from callapple.org/u3, though final versions will likely require macOS 26, and each comes with an optional Ultimore Cheater. With permission now secured for the whole series, more Ultimore games are on the way.

The September Global Event Calendar
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
A roundup of September 2026 events worldwide, each with dates, a link, and a short description. It spans Apple II and retro gatherings such as VCF Midwest, WOzFest, and several retro expos; demoparties including Jumalauta and the Byterapers 40th Anniversary Party; gaming and esports events from PAX West and BlizzCon to the Tokyo Game Show; and developer and industry conferences like CppCon, RustConf, Dreamforce, and OpenAI DevDay.

Apple Folklore — Shut Up!
by Andy Hertzfeld / A.P.P.L.E. Staff
Andy Hertzfeld recalls the move from hand-wire-wrapped Mac prototypes to a printed circuit board in 1981, and the meeting where Steve Jobs critiqued the board’s layout on looks alone, invoking the craftsman who won’t use lousy wood on the hidden back of a cabinet. The team spent about $5,000 on a prettier layout that, as Burrell Smith predicted, didn’t work, and quietly switched back.

Original Norse Wanderer BBS Back Online
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
Michael Heilemann has resurrected The Norse Wanderer, the underground Apple II+ BBS he ran as a teenager in the early 1980s. Working from disk images he rescued before the Palisades fire, he spent four months bringing it back online, recovering 230 original user accounts and some of the original message posts.

Dunjonquest: Sorcerer of Siva, The Thanksgiving Walkout of 1981
by Ernst Krogtoft / A.P.P.L.E. Staff
Ernst Krogtoft recounts the 1981 standoff inside Automated Simulations, where Jon Freeman pushed to modernize the aging Dunjonquest engine behind Temple of Apshai and co-founder Jim Connelley refused, a fight that came to a head at Thanksgiving. Caught in the middle was Sorcerer of Siva, the last standalone Dunjonquest title, with George Barr cover art, an Apple II version featuring Toni Thompson’s sharper graphics, and a final showdown that hinges on saving a Lightning Bolt spell. Freeman and Anne Westfall went on to create Archon at Free Fall Associates, while the company pivoted to action games as Epyx.

Genius 1-3 for the Apple II Release 20 Downloads
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
Download links for all three Genius episodes (Into the Toy Warehouses, Into the Toy Caves, and Into the Toy Planets) for the Apple II (via the A.P.P.L.E. store), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, and Atari 8-bit.

The Handy Reference Directory — Quickdraw Demo for LISA
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
A.P.P.L.E. brings back the LISA Quickdraw Demo Workshop, its handy reference to the Lisa’s QuickDraw, Hardware, and SysCall Pascal routines produced courtesy of David Redhed. It is now available in the A.P.P.L.E. Store with a newly updated PDF manual and the original 3.5-inch disk image for the Lisa and Mac XL.

Applesauce FDC: 2.08 Software Update
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff / John Morris
Release notes for Applesauce FDC software 2.07 (June 17, 2026) and 2.08 (July 13, 2026). New support covers Heathkit HDOS 640K and 720K disks, a “combined” side option for CP/M, and CoCo RS-DOS disks beyond 78 granules. Fixes include the fast imager, the disk-map display, and firmware update notifications, along with several contributions from David Schmidt. The earlier 2.06.x notes are included as well.

Apple II Files and Utility Programs
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
A quick-reference roundup of essential Apple II software and where to get it: ADTPro 2.1.0 for disk imaging and bootstrapping over serial or Ethernet, Apple Game Server 3.1 for floppy-free booting, the Highlands Computer Services (HCS) software archive, Virtual II 13.0.1, and the KEGS 1.38 Apple IIgs emulator.

itty-bitty-vtty 1.06 / Clock Signal Emulator
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
Kelvin Sherlock’s itty-bitty-vtty delivers accurate, operating-system-free VT100 emulation on the Apple IIgs via the modem port at 9600 baud 8-N-1 (matching MAME’s defaults), leaving out only a few hardware-limited features. Also covered is Tom Harte’s latest Clock Signal multi-platform emulator release, which updates its Apple II and Macintosh emulation.

TimeOut Edit BASIC / ROM-inator for Mac
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
Hugh Hood’s TimeOut Edit BASIC 5.4 lets AppleWorks 5.1 users load, view, and edit Applesoft BASIC programs without leaving AppleWorks (source code included). Kay Koba’s Mac ROM-inator I kits for the Mac Plus, 512K, and 128K remain available in Economy, Standard, and Luxury versions.

Ciderpress II 1.1.0 / Apple II Disk Browser II
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
Two essential disk-image tools. Andy McFadden’s CiderPress II, the successor to CiderPress, offers a Windows GUI and a cross-platform command-line version supporting numerous archive and disk image formats, multi-partition layouts, physical drives, and file conversion. Denis Molony’s DiskBrowser II, a JavaFX rewrite, lets you flip through disk images down to the sector level, with full source available.

AppleCommander 13.0
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff
A brief spotlight on AppleCommander 13.0, the Java-based disk image utility that runs on most major platforms and converts and exports files between Apple II disk image formats.

URLs used in this month’s issue

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