Author: A.P.P.L.E.

Fredrik Ramsberg, curator of the PunyInform library, has announced the latest edition of the PunyComp programming contest for PunyInform library users. The PunyComp 2025 event requires all submissions be made by the 1 December 2025. Voting by the public on the best submissions will begin shortly thereafter and will end on 1 January 2026. The winners will be announced after that. This years theme requires players of your game to interact with an animal within the game in order to…

The Ample MAME interface for Mac OS has been updated. Ample version 0.280 marks the 72nd release of the Ample MAME Interface brings the interface in line with the latest release of MAME and includes two new ROMs which can be downloaded within the interface. Also, this release of Ample now requires a minimum of MacOS 10.14 or newer. To download the latest version of Ample, check out the Ample GitHub page at:https://github.com/ksherlock/ample

The 350 Point version of the classic text adventure game, ADVENTURE is now available on more than 32 different retro computing machines including the latest version for the Mega 65. The game is sometimes called Advent, because the system it was created on in the 70s would not allow filenames to be more than six characters long. This game is sometimes considered as the very first text adventure. This particular version of the game came out on 24 November 2024,…

From our friends David Greelish and Randy Kindig: Stay tuned, new chapters are coming up for the great classic book, “Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer,” in audiobook form, and on YouTube. See the discussion where Randy Kindig (Floppy Days Vintage Computing Podcast) and I discuss it, Stan Veit and more, as an introduction! at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpxqp11HpZw The NEW audiobook chapters of “Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer: From Altair to IBM, A History of the PC Revolution.” By…

Philip Lord has introduced a version of Pac-Man in AppleSoft BASIC. The game is a text based version of the popular arcade game. While this may excite many Apple II fans, this game at the moment is only for emulators as it is absolutely too slow to run on a normal Apple II at 1 MHZ. However, the game does run and plays actually quite well for the Apple II fan running either Applewin or Virtual II. Notes from the…

From Nicholas Bernhard, @nantucketlit@mastodon.social For any #AppleII fans out there, I’ve been working on my very first game. It’s called Catching Snowflakes. https://codeberg.org/nantucketlit/snowflakes You play as Billy Bigfeet, and the goal is to catch as many falling snowflakes as you can.  The game is playable using an Apple II emulator. I’m using a #freesoftware license.

Some highlights:PunyInform v6.0 is out! Some highlights: https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform/releases

The Ample graphical interface for the MAME emulation platform has been updated. Ample is as the author, Kelvin Sherlock puts it, “A slightly more user-friendly front-end for using MAME as an emulator.” This update includes Includes the MAME 0.279 compatibility. Also this version now requires MacOS 10.14 or later. Ample now includes emulation for the Apple 1, II and III series computers as well as a number of clones. It also includes Retro Macintosh, Acorn, Atari ST, Commodore, Oric and…

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…

Henry Lowe has announced the release of the version 1.9 update to his Card Cat card identification software for the Apple II series computers. This latest version of the software includes the following changes and updates: You can download the latest version of the Card Cat program from the Henry’s website for the program at: https://henrylowe.net/card-cat/

From Jawaid Bazyar, I’m very pleased to announce the release of GSSquared v0.4.0. GSSquared is a complete Apple II systems emulator. Version 0.4.0 offers significant enhancements (see below). Ready-to-run Binaries for MacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel “fat” binary); Windows 64; and Linux Ubuntu 22.04 provided at the github release page: https://github.com/jawaidbazyar2/gssquared major updates to the current release:

The Ample graphical interface for MAME emulation has been updated. Ample version 0.278 also known as Ample Release 70 is a MacOS based interface which allows users to easily access and use a number of emulation platforms included in the MAME package. Ample includes a number of emulated computing platforms including an extensive focus on the Retro Apple II / III series computers and clones including the China Education Computer and the Franklin series computers, Retro Macintosh platforms and the…

Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe software has announce that the Apple II cassette archive project has reached a total of 727 cassettes for the Apple II computer having been identified and archived. Started in 2011, the project has a stated goal of identifying and archiving all cassette based software for the Apple II computer. This project has progressed mostly in drips and drabs over the years but the current number is unbelievable. According to Antoine’s post announcing this milestone: In…

From Jawaid Bayzar:I am pleased to announce the release of GSSquared v0.3.5. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes code reorganization geared towards putting in place all the pieces needed to support launching multiple Apple II hardware types from one instance of GSSquared. But there are many user-facing new features too: Some bugs were fixed: The system is now in a solid place to start development of Apple IIe features. Packages: https://github.com/jawaidbazyar2/gssquared/releases/tag/v0.3.5

Back in 2005, Steve Jobs gave one of the most iconic commencement speeches ever and now we know what went into the speech. The Steve Jobs Archive has released the emails that Steve sent to himself in order to create the speech. 8 emails include an outline of the speech as well as the individual pieces of the speech. The emails include individual thoughts for each section of the outline and shows a lot of how Steve thought about life…

Ralle Pa has announced the availability of the new A2DVI v.4.4 card for the Apple II. This new version of the A2DVI card comes with 5 selectable firmwares pre-loaded: You can purchase the card on the A2DVI store at https://apple2.co.uk/Products

The PunyInform adventure game programming library has been updated to version 5.14. PunyInform is a library written in Inform 6 which allows authors to create text adventure games / interactive fiction using the Z-machine virtual machine, to be played on 8-bit computers as well as newer platforms. It provides a parser, implementations of common verbs, as well as a framework for writing text adventures. Changes in the PunyInform Library are as follows for this release: New/changed functionality Optimizations: Bugfixes: Important…

The organizers of INIT HELLO, a new Apple II conference, posted a press release about their event: “On July 26-27, 2025, the inaugural meeting of INIT HELLO will take place, at the System Source Computer Museum, in Hunt Valley, MD (just north of Baltimore). INIT HELLO is a two-day gathering of Apple II enthusiasts, working on (and showing off) their projects, giving presentations, participating in workshops and contests, touring the museum, and just hanging out with fellow enthusiasts. The keynote presentation…

Stefan Wessels has announced the immediate availability of his new RetroMate frontend for the Apple II computer. According to the release on Slack: Here’s the first beta release of RetroMate. RetroMate is a front-end for the Free Internet Chess Server. It requires an IP65 network interface (Uthernet II in AppleWin works great). The source is not yet available, but will be soon (some issues to iron out – for example logout will throw a few errors, slowly, before it goes…

For those users who are using the latest version of the Virtual II Apple II Emulator, you will want to download the Virtual II version 13.0.1 update. This release is a single problem focused minor update. Last week a user reported that printing on the Imagewriter was broken in version 13.0. The update fixes this issue. You can download the latest version of the Virtual II Emulator from the Virtual II website at:https://www.virtualii.com/