Author: Bill Martens

A.P.P.L.E. Chairman of the Board and Club president -- Bill worked for the founder, Val J. Golding and A.P.P.L.E. from 1981 to 1982. In 1999, he began archiving the materials which were distributed and sold by A.P.P.L.E.. That project led to the group that remained of A.P.P.L.E. Bill was involved in the financial industry in Tokyo and has over 20 major office infrastructure projects to his name. In March 2001, he retired to write books and to spend more time pursuing personal interests. As the president of the users group, Bill is in charge of distribution of Call-A.P.P.L.E. magazine as well as the organization of this web site. Bill currently resides in Tokyo, Japan and Shelton, Wa splitting time between the places.

Java Apple Computer Emulator (JACE) Released

Brendan Robert and Nick Westgate released a new Java based Apple ][ emulator which has a number of features not found in other emulators.  The new emulator also runs on a number of OS platforms that are normally not supported by emulator writers.  The full release from Brendan is below: Jace (Java Apple Computer Emulator) has finally been poked and prodded enough to be a usable emulator.  It’s not AppleWin, nor will it ever try to be.  But it is…

Bill Budge Receives Pioneer Award

There was an article in Wired Magazine Yesterday about Apple ][ software pioneer Bill Budge and his being awarded the 2nd annual Pioneer Award which is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.  You can check out the article in Wired at: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/01/bill-budge-pioneer/ Bill Budge is scheduled to present the 2011 KFest Keynote speech.

The history of The Oregon Trail Game

Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the creation of the Oregon Trail Game, Jessica Lussenhop has written what is likely the most thorough history of the game and the three men who created it. While the game started out as just a lowly text type mainframe based game, it became an icon of American Education over the past 30 or so years of its history once the graphical version was produced by MECC in 1985.  You can read…

Contiki 2.5.rc1 Available for Download

Oliver Schmidth posted a note about Contiki 2.5.rc1 being made available for download this morning.  The suite allows complete connectivity for vintage computer platforms via ethernet to the Internet.  The full release follows: Contiki 2.5.rc1 binary release for Retrocomputing’ has just been made available on http://contiki.cbm8bit.com/ and http://a2retrosystems.com/contiki.html It’s a straight compile of the unmodified Contiki 2.5.rc1 sources avialable on http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/contiki/Contiki/Contiki%202…. using cc65 2.13.2 The major changes are: – Support of the Atari 8-bit machines with the cart described on…

An A.P.P.L.E. Review: Icy Escort from Donut Games

by Bill Martens Product: Icy Escort Version: 1.10 Size: 4.4mb Requires: iPhone OS 3.0 Languages: English Website: http://www.donutgames.com/ This past week, I began to look at games for my iPhone 3Gs and of course, there are plenty out there.  However, the distance between the good, the bad, and the downright ugly is tremendous.  One diamond in the rough was a game I ran across from Swedish Game Development AB, also known as Donut Games.  Icy Escort is a puzzle style…

The Ultimate Apple ][ Fonts for Your Computer

Reviewer : Bill Martens Version : 1.0 Date : 2008/12/30 Publisher: Kreative Korporation Website : http://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml Category : Mac Intel / Miscellaneous / New Release Cost : Free About The Program : A young college student, Rebecca Bettencourt, has creative a beautiful rendition of the Apple II and Apple IIgs fonts. These fonts have been done in True Type format for both Mac OS X and Windows as well as any other system which can handle true type fonts. The…

The iPad : Cool Toy or Usable Machine?

By Bill Martens Apple, Inc. this past month introduced a machine that everyone is talking about in one respect or another.  While the coolness factor of the machine has been undeniable from those who have had them in their hands, there has also been a lot of negative comments about the machine. Firstly, the iPad has not even been put on sale yet, however, it has generated more buzz than almost any machine in history outside of the iPhone.  This…

MountIt 1.3 Puts Apple II Drive On A PC

MountIt 1.3 is a new Permanent Init File devoted to handling different disk image files (.DSK, .PO and .2MG) of any size (from 32KB to the maximum RAM available), only ProDOS based. Up to sixteen volumes can be added to the system. MountIt mounts volumes as read-only if the original disk image file is locked. Otherwise, the disk image file is mounted as read/write and the following operations can be performed: read, write and format. MountIt is not ProDOS 8…

The Editor Still Bytes Back

Another year is here, Apple has once again shocked the world, Mac World Expo is under threat of no big company participation and we here at A.P.P.L.E. are working on more projects than we know what to do with.  What that means for our members is that there will be new hardware available once again after a 19 year hiatus from the hardware realm. Our engineers have been involved in the A2GS-L01 laptop project for the past two months, and…

Yule’s Christmas Quest — An A.P.P.L.E. Review

Product: Yule’s Christmas Quest. Version : 1.1 Date : 2008/12/14 Publisher: Candlestone Productions Website : http://www.candlestoneproductions.com Category : Mac Intel / Game / New Release Cost : Free About The Program : Candlestone Productions has released a nifty little Christmas game / adventure game which is directed primarily at kids. Yule’s Christmas Quest is a freeware package that focuses on the idea of finding all of the gifts from the twelve days of Christmas. Santa apparently forgets where he puts…

MacWorld Expo Rumors

Every year about this time, everyone begins clamouring over each other to put out the juiciest rumor about what would be presented at MacWorld Expo by Apple. So we decided we would put our hat in the ring as well and give our two cents to the pot. For months now, everyone has been putting OS X on every PC subnotebook known to man including the EE-PC. While this might not seem like a stretch, we think it is quite…

Kansasfest Site 2.0

Ken Gagne, owner of Juiced GS Magazine has announced the release of the new and improved Kansas Fest website.  The gathering which brings Apple ][ enthusiasts together from all corners of the earth, is held every july in Kansas City, Missouri. With attendance at around 50 members each year, new items related to Apple ][ computing are announced each year, making this one of the must attend conventions for any Vintage computing fan. According to the press release from Ken…

HandBrake — An A.P.P.L.E. Review

Product : Handbrake Version : 0.92 Cost : Free License :  GPL Platforms : Mac OS X, Linux, Windows URL : http://handbrake.fr/ This month, we had the distinct pleasure of discovering a tool which makes video conversion an absolute breeze.  As a football player, all of our games have been recorded on DVD and Video.  While the Video could be recorded straight to the computer, the DVD presented some interesting issues. We wanted to convert our video to a format…

New BBS Goes Online using GBBS Pro

It looks like someone finally put a GBBS back online.  Gene Buckle has put up his Age of Reason BBS using GBBS 1.3j which was developed by L&L Productions in 1986.  This software ran many of the BBS’s during the 1980’s and 1990’s eventually coming to a screeching halt when the IIgs was discontinued and with the Internet becoming more popular. While many people have tried to put up BBS’s in the past 10 years, not many of them lasted. …

Apple II Duo Disk Cable

Many people over the past few years have been searching for the ever elusive DuoDisk Cable.  Unfortunately, the longer we go in time from actual sale of the cable, the further between the sales of them on Ebay are. But now, thanks to Herb Johnson, we now have a great pinout chart of the cable which is as follows: DB25 male DB19 male 2    1 3    18 4    2 5    15 ——– 6    19 7    6 8    9 9,21    3…

Apple Drops Notorious iPhone NDA

Apple, Inc this week dropped their notorious NDA associated with the iPhone Development Kit.  The NDA which had been the scorn of programmers around the globe had become so burdensome that developers were shying away from the iPhone due to their inability to discuss anything with any other developers. The release on the web site said “To Our Developers We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. We put the NDA in place because the…

Michael Mahon Moves his Apple Crate Website

The inventor of the only real multitasking Apple II computer, Michael Mahon has moved his website.  The move of the Apple Crate II website was necessitated by the decision by America Online (AOL) to discontinue hosting websites.  Michael has chosen Comcast as his new host for the site. The new URL is http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

iListen — An A.P.P.L.E. Review

Product:    iListen (with USB Headset/Microphone) Cost:        $149.00 Publisher:    Mac Speech Website:    www.macspeech.com Over the years, there have been many speech recognition packages come and go.  Unfortunately none of them have been very good.  Until Now. iListen came on a single CD, installed in 10 minutes on out iBook 1.33  and went off without a hitch.  Upon installing it, attaching our  headset which came with the package, we started to configure the system to prepare it for speech recognition. While…

Google Maps Plugin 2.4 — An A.P.P.L.E. Review

The latest version of the Google Maps Plugin for Mac OS X is now available from the Google Map Plugin site.  We decided that since we use Google Maps quite often, we would download and install the package on an iBook that we had sitting around. While most packages are take a lot to install, these plugins are about as easy as it gets.  Just unpack the zip file from the download.  Copy the plugin files from the Google Maps…

Bytes From The Apple

Well another month has passed, and it seems that every month we get a will later in later in the production process. The this month we have a few special items in the magazine, including reviews of iListen, by emulator, and various other software packages. In the world of innovation, Vince Briel  has been working on  a new version of the replica one. The latest  version will include a USB connector as well as power connectors for the newer ATX…