Author: Bill Martens
A new Apple II game, Genius, has been released by Daniele Liverani. The game was primarily written for performance with emulators but has been optimized to run on the original hardware as well. You can try the game out on the Virtual Apple II website at: http://www.virtualapple.org/geniusdisk.html Genius is currently available for free download from: For emulator or Original hardware — https://www.facebook.com/download/852863848091025/GENIUS_Apple_%5D%5B_Ver4B.dsk The source code for the game has also been released and is available in an RTF format document…
REuters is reporting that an Aple-1 computer originally owned by Charles Ricketts is going on the auction block at Christies Auction House. The Apple-1 is fully functional and comes complete with the cancelled check from the purchase in July 1976. Estimated to go at about 600,000 USD, this particular Apple-1 has been owned by three people including Bruce Waldack and its current owner Luther Roberts. While other auction houses have had better luck with selling Apple-1 computers, Christies has only…
A working Apple-1 computer recently listed by Bonhams Auction House has sold for a world record 905,000 USD. This particular Apple-1, originally sold by the Byte Shop in Mountain View, Ca., was one of 50 hand built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the famed Apple garage, is one of only 15 known to actually function. This Apple-1 will reside at it’s new home, The Henry Ford Museum. For more on the Bonham’s auction, check out the auction website…
On this, the third anniversary of Steve Jobs passing, we take a look back at the man we knew or thought we knew. Many of us had passing experiences with the one person who changed so much about the way we do business and run our personal lives. Where would the world be without the iPhone or the iPad or the iPod. These three items made our daily lives different in the way we enjoyed our music, our movies and…
Apple this week released the Gold Master Candidates for Mac OS X Yosemite and XCode 6.1 also put Apple in the position of asking developers to submit their Yosemite based Apps to the app store. The latest version of Mac OS X and also the development environment XCode are in the final stages of work correctly bugs and are expected to be released within the next couple of weeks. For more information, check out the Apple Developer news website…
The logn awaited return of the Wasteland series has arrived. Brian Fargo announced the release of the latest rendition of Wasteland, Wasteland 2, on twitter this evening. The game will be IS available through Steam as well as GOG.com. Brian made the release video available through YouTube this evening as well:
The crew at the Retro Computing Roundtable have posted Episode 83rd their podcast. This weeks panelists include Paul Hagstrom hosting the Roundtable with Michael Mulhern and Mike Whalen. This week the panel discusses a number of Apple related items including Which Apple II, if you can only have one? Why didn’t 6502 computers get faster? History of Personal Computing podcast Newly discovered Apple I up for auction Chris Osborne on using modems without a land line and his Level 29…
In the aftermath of the outrage over forcing users to download the U2 Album, Songs of Innocence, Apple has relented and created a website tool which allows users to remove the album. Many users found the album automatically added to their purchases who had absolutely no interest in the album and no way to remove the album from their purchases. The SOI removal tool webpage is at: https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/offerOptOut
From Andrew Roughan — The next Australian retro computing gathering, Oz KFest, will be happening in Melbourne, Australia, April 17-19, 2015. Come join us downunder for a few of days of retro inspiration, Aussie ingenuity and camaraderie! The goal of the event is to provide a user group style environment to exchange ideas and discuss new developments in retro computing hardware, software, preservation, emulation and other related topics. There will be a few attendees of past KansasFests and Oz KFests…
Auction House Bonhams has another Apple-1 in its possession which will be auctioned off on October 22nd. While there are approximately 60 of the Steve Wozniak created Apple-1 motherboards, only about a dozen or so have been shown to work. Previous auctions of similarly functioning machines have fetched anywhere between 385,000 and 650,000 USD. The Apple-1 belonged to John Anderson who was the Founder of the Cincinnati AppleSiders User Group who kept the machine enclosed in a glass case for…
The developer of one of the most popular platform games of the early 1980’s has passed away. Lode Runner was an overnight success for Douglas E. Smith and had heavy competition from several publishers after he submitted the game for evaluation. The game originally was developed on the Apple II and became so popular that it has appeared on many of the later gaming platforms. His latest incarnations of the Lode Runner game were being published through Tozai Games.
The Apple2Scans Website has posted a scan of the Apple II book, Assembly Language Programming for the Apple II by Robert Mottola. The book is a 96 mb PDF and is available for download at: http://www.apple2scans.net/2014/09/01/assembly-language-programming-for-the-apple-ii/
IDG is shuttering the print section of their MacWorld publication. While there website will continue to exist and publish information, their print publication will cease to exist. Dan Miller, the editor of the magazine posted a note on Twitter about staying on for another month with the company, while others like Jason Snell also announced their own departures. Snell had been a writer with the magazine for the past 17 years. Another MacWorld writer, Ted Landau posted a number…
As part of the iPhone6 announcement, Apple Inc. also announced that iOS8, the next version of their mobile operating system, will be released on September 17th. Apple also announced that they will be continuing support of the older iPad 2 with this release as well as the iPhone 4’s, 5’s and 6’s.
World famous designer Marc Newson is joining Sir Jonathan Ive’s design team at apple according to an article in Vanity Fair. The article. While the pair have worked on some projects before, this has all the appearances of a Steve Jobs/Tim Cook style ascendency to the top design position in Apple currently held by Sir Ive. This is not the first time that Marc and Sir Ive have collaborated on projects, having worked together on the famous Apple Red project…
Apple has announced that they will be streaming the Scheduled September 9th live over the Internet. The event which is expected to announce the availability of the iPhone and iWatch among other things will be held in Cupertino at 10am that day. The announcement for the live stream appears on the main Apple website, allowing users to add the calendar item to their calendar app. This is a marked separation from the Steve Jobs era in Apple’s current habit of…
Nishida Radio has released a photo of a prototype HDMI card for the Apple IIe that they have been working on. Proprietor, Koichi Nishida mentioned in a short conversation yesterday that he will be creating the //c version of the HDMi card first. The popularity of Nishida’s previous cards has meant that stock has been dificult for him to maintain as most of the cards sell as quickly as he is able to assemble them. The HDMI cards will likely…
Blake Patterson, author of the Byte Cellar blog has given us a look inside the prototypes of FROG Design Inc. Many of the machines long only rumored to have existed are now available in full living color. Check out more at: http://www.bytecellar.com/2014/09/03/a-rare-glimpse-of-a-memorial-apple-prototype-display-at-frog/
The first hints of anything really happening in the world of the now highly anticipated iWatch come from Apple’s master of design, Sir Jonathan Ive. Sir Ive has been long known for his brashness and his means of shaping the Apple product line and said recently in a New York Times Interview , “According to a designer who works at Apple, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, in bragging about how cool he thought the iWatch was shaping up to be,…
Apple has released another Developer Preview version of their latest version of Mac OS X 10.10. As they ramp up for release, there are several items in this preview which reflect the direction Apple is taking with the desktop including a number of updated icons in both the System Preferences and the Applications / utilities directories. In addition to these changes, Apple has also removed the Software Update option from the Apple Menu. Updates are now completely handled through the…
