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

The Apple II DiskBrowser, the popular disk viewing app created by Denis Molony has been updated. DisBrowser Version 1.0.33 includes several new capabilities including the ability to view DOS 4.1 floppy disks as well as CPM/DOS and PASCAL/DOS hybrid disks. The Apple II DiskBrowser is a free download in .JAR format from:https://github.com/dmolony/DiskBrowser

The Virtual II emulator has been updated. The penultimate Apple II emulator for Mac OS X, Virtual II has a number of new features and changes including the following: Disk drives can be configured with a “read only” switch. While the virtual machine runs, just flip the switch to “on” to prevent the disk from being modified. The “Make All Drives Read-Only” entry in the Quick settings menu is a shortcut to protect all mounted disks in one go, essentially…

A bug in Facetime which allowed users to listen in on their contacts without the contact answering a call forced Apple, Inc. into firefighting mode today. Facetime Group Conferencing was taken offline and according to the status website is still offline. (https://www.apple.com/ca/support/systemstatus/) As of 12pm EST 31 January 2019, the Group feature of the app still was down.

Big Mess O’ Wires (BMOW) announced this morning that they were releasing the Yellowstone controller card to the public. The release makes the cards a Creative Commons license open source project. Yellowstone is a Liron compatible disk controller for the Apple II. The original Liron cards were created in 1985 but this card uses FPGA to handle all aspects of the cards control features. You can download the source and design data from the BMOW website at: https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/01/28/yellowstone-goes-open-source/

Melody Ayers-Griffiths, co-publisher of the Paleotonic computer magazine, has converted the Peter Gunn theme to Chiptune. The conversion of the theme song was performed with a converter program inside of the Apple II emulator created by Paleotronic, the Microm8 Emulator. to listen to the conversion, click on the embedded sound player below or go to the Soundcloud website at:https://soundcloud.com/girlybits/peter-gunn

Homeputerium, sponsors of the 10 liner contest, have announced the 2019 rendition of the contest. The 10 Liner Contest is for 8 bit systems and is focused on 8-Bit systems. The object of the contest is for programmers to develop a complete playable arcade game within 10 lines. Three categories exist in the contest with the 80 character per line 10-liner, the 120 character per line 10 liner and the Extreme category or up to 256 character per line 10…

The MacCast, a podcast produced by Adam Christianson, has released the 690th episode of the podcast. This latest episode goes over a myriad of Macintosh related topics including: AirPower still, still, coming… Snow in the underworld. Target will have Apple Pay. Apple Stagelight not a new video app. Apple updates all the OSes. AirPod 2 rumors. Apple reduces Titan staff. iPhone XR is ‘bestselling’ iPhone. AR app recommendation. Scheduling a Genius Bar appointment. The trouble with trade-ins. Stopping robocalls on…

Brutal Deluxe has announced the addition of over 150mb of new Cortland documents. The documents, from 1985 through 1987 include a hose of items covering topics from Apple Talk to SANE Tools to the addition of the APDAlog France. You can download the documents in a series of individual files or in zipped batches from the Cortland documentation site at: http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/documentation/cortland.html

The Apple II Slice project has been completed. The Apple II Slice, basically is an Apple IIe emulator running on a raspberry Pi inside of a majorly shortened Apple II case. This project was undertaken by its creator, well known Apple fan and co-host of the RetroMacCast, John Leake, in order to utilize a broken Apple IIe case. The case, which was broken beyond repair, was then cannibalized by slicing the useful and needed sections from the original and then…

Brutal deluxe software announced the immediate release of the entirety of their Applesauce Disk image collection. The Brutal deluxe collection created by Antoine Vignau is a 1680+ program collection containing more than 3000 disk sides. The entire collection is now available for download via Bit Torrent through the Archive.org website at:https://archive.org/details/Antoine_Applesauce_Vignau

The dates for the Apple II Festival France 2019 have been set. According to the announcement from Stephane Briancourt, the event will be held August 7, 2019 to August 11, 2019 at the Domain Le Castagne in Auch, France. The Apple II Festival France is an annual gathering of the French Apple II fans with Apple II fans from across Europe and from around the globe attending the event. Displays of the latest hardware and software from the French Apple…

Christopher Mosher has released a software package which allows a more precise recovery method of recovering Cassette tapes with data on them. Being as most of the tapes created for computers with cassette interfaces were created in the 1970’s the quality of the tapes and the data recovered from them can be quite problematic. But according to Chris’s Facebook posting, he says, “I’ve tested it on a limited number of images and it has successfully recovered some that wouldn’t load…

For nearly 20 years, Wordperfect 2.21a for the Apple II gs did not support the year 2000 and beyond. That is no longer the case. Thanks to some skillful hacking by Brutal Deluxe’s Antoine Vignau, Wordperfect now has full Y2K compliant date support. For nearly 20 years, Wordperfect 2.21a for the Apple II gs did not support the year 2000 and beyond. That is no longer the case. Thanks to some skillful hacking by Brutal Deluxe’s Antoine Vignau, Wordperfect now…

If you are a fan of the game “Another World”, the Éric Chahi produced game, on the Amiga or Atari ST or “Out of this World” as it is known in the U.S., then you will want to check out the demo of the game for the Apple II that Vince Weaver has created. While he has only mocked up the first two screens of the game, the game demo is still playable. According to Vince, “so far it is…

The Virtual II Apple II emulator has been updated. Version 9 is a major update to the Virtual II emulator . It includes the ability to convert Apple II floppy disks on the fly as well as the ability to index the disks. This update includes a bevy of updates including: Introduction of the “peripherals” side bar, combining the contents of the device and performance drawers. Due to Apple deprecating the drawers feature in macOS 10.14, these drawers have been removed….

Dagen Brock, the author of Flapple Bird and the GS PLUS emulator, has released an new multi-platform tool for producing icons. Buckshot is an image production utility which is based on the BMP2DHR conversion program. Buckshot is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows and is a free download. While still in the early phases of development, it is stable and allows users to convert their images immediately. Buckshot has support for a host of graphics sizes as well…

Chris Morrison has posted an interesting new item to his VintageGeek Blog this past couple of weeks. He takes the viewers on a ride through the ups and downs of building a MicroDrive Turbo card for the Apple IIgs using images from the Alex Lee curated WITA2GS website as well as the utility CiderPress running on Windows. If you are interested in running real Apple IIgs hardware with the Microdrive Turbo then you definitely will want to have a look…

Episode 687 of the Adam Christianson produced MacCast has been released. This episode covers a host of topics including the Quarter 1 revision of guidance from Apple concerning the downturn in iPhone sales in China. Also, the AirPower, iTunes coming to “Smart TVs” and rumors of a Tri-Lens iPhone. More review of external DVD drives is also covered as well as UIs. Check out the MacCast podcast at their website:http://www.maccast.com/

The floppies for the A2OSX multi-tasking operating system project have been updated. The update to the version 0.92 has been ongoing for several months now with all but two or three items remaining in the 0.91 version. The project is currently run by Remy Gibert with programming help from Patrick Kloepher. The aim of the project is to produce a Unix like multi-tasking operating system which will run on a standard Apple IIe. Check out the project at:https://github.com/burniouf/A2osX

John Morris has announced that he is now taking orders for the 2nd run of the Applesauce Floppy Drive Controller.  The Applesauce FDC allows users to digitally image their floppy disks (both personal and commercial) in the original format of the disk as it was created.  These disk images are then stored in WOZ format (an emulator format), DSK format (old emulator format) or as a raw or A2R file. Built into the Applesauce FDC Software is support for both…