Category: Vintage

Charles Mangin of RetroConnector fame has posted photos of his Apple //c Plus Headphone Jack.  At press time, the only information we have outside of the photos of the unit are a promise from Charles that installation video and documentation will be available soon. To view the Apple //c Plus Headphone Jack information, check out the RetroConnector blog at: http://retroconnector.com/updates/

Brutal Deluxe software has updated the Apple II cassette tape collection with a new addition.  Curator and Apple II aficionado, Antoine Vignau announced this week that Creative Computing’s Mission Impossible has been added to the collection bringing the total number of tapes to 634.  To view or download the collection, check out the Apple II Cassette Collection website at: http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/projects/cassettes/

Another Apple-1 computer is being auctioned by Bonhams Auction House.  The Apple-1 owned by one Tom Romkey, a personal computer store owner in Florida, has owned the computer for the past 39 years.   The board, having sat on a shelf for the majority of that time, is in pristine condition and is expected to draw 300,000 to 500,000 USD at the auction. The Apple-1’s were built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the garage of Steve Jobs home in…

First prize donated by A2RetroSystems. What do you love most about using an Apple II? Probably that it’s an open system, will expand only to the limits of your imagination, and that it’s straightforward to understand and program. But be honest: you probably also love the retro feel of the machine: the curves, the glow of the CRT, the sounds of the Disk II, the rainbow Apple logo. The theme of this contest is to recreate that vintage feel in…

Ciderpress version 4.0.1 has been released.  The update to the disk utility was posted on the Ciderpress website, however change notes were not available at press time.  Ciderpress is a Windows based utility for manipulation of Apple II disks and runs on all Windows system from XP to the latest version. Updates in Version 4.0.1 include the following items: Added support for displaying hi-res images compressed with LZ4FH. Fixed handling of semicolons in Merlin assembly source conversion. Fixed “find” feature…

Oliver Guinart has announced a new Visual Studio language reference for the Merlin32 Assembler.  The announcement appeared in Oliver’s twitter feed last last night and promises some big things for the future of Apple IIgs programming. Prototype of a Visual Studio language service for Merlin32. Similar to the CC65 integration I demo’ed in France. pic.twitter.com/oZ2b2kBmzd — Olivier Guinart (@OlivierGuinart) August 26, 2015

In RCR Episode 107, Paul Hagstrom and Earl Evans discuss the Host Topic: The End Of Retrocomputing We here on the speaking end of these microphones have a pretty similar timelines with computers, having been young and eager when computers were just entering the “personal” era. No doubt a part of the current interest in re-exploring that time is nostalgia. Will people who were 10 in 2003 (Bart Simpson aside) play around with old Dell Windows boxes when the mid…

Option8 has announced that the Audio Connectors for the Apple II are now shipping.  Introduced by Option8 owner Charles Mangin at Kansasfest 2015, the Audio Connector allows the user to connect headphones or external speakers to the Apple II series computers. For more information, check out the Option8 website on Tindle at: https://www.tindie.com/products/option8/speaker-connector-for-apple-ii/ You can also check out the RetroConnector blog at http://retroconnector.com/

Antoine Vignau has posted a Youtube video of the missing B-Side ending for the Apple II game Lady Tut.  While many cracks of the game have appeared over the years, somehow they all missed Programe’s Ending to the game. Originally published in 1983, this is the first time the ending has been seen in the wild. The video is available for viewing below: You can play the original game on Virtual Apple II at: http://www.virtualapple.org/ladytutdisk.html

From Jeremy Rand via the Kansasfest List: Today, I received the new No Slot Clock from Ultimate Apple 2 as found here on their store: https://www.ultimateapple2.com/catalogzen154/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_16&products_id=70 This inspired me to do some coding to try to use my new toy.  It turns out that cc65 will use a real time clock if one is present and supported by ProDOS.  The No Slot Clock just needs a special .system program to launch first to enable support for the clock in ProDOS. …

For those of you who have been searching for a methodology of hooking up an Apple II to a TV via HDMI, Alex Lukacz’s latest experiment may be the answer you have been looking for.  Using a BBBLack credit card sized computer, he has managed to wire up a reasonable connection allowing for the Apple //c video output to be displayed via HDMI. For more information, check out Alex’s website at: http://lukazi.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/a2-serial-video-to-hdmi-converter.html UPDATE: A video demonstration of the hack has…

Charles Mangin has announced that his 1/3 scale Apple IIgs Raspberry PI case is now available.  Available for the price of $100.00 USD, the case is specifically built for the Raspberry PI 2 and the Model-B Plus.   Each case has been painted the original platinum color and  measures 113x95x38mm. A deluxe version of the case is available with scale model mouse and keyboard, or you can order a custom made case from Charles as well. For more information and…

Jimmy Maher, curator of The Digital Antiquarian has released a very in depth review of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.  His article goes into quite a bit of detail about Ken Williams, Sierra, as well as the back lash that they faced with publishing the program.  The article also talks about Al Lowe and Mark Crowe’s involvement in the project and how it was kept under wraps in order to keep investors from dumping the…

Benoit Gilon has announced the immediate release of the Peersoft Applesoft Extensions version 1.5.5.  Shown extensively at the recent Apple II Festival France, this extension package allows for user defined functions to be added to Applesoft through both machine language and Applesoft.  What’s new? Ability to define up to 10 user defined functions. Such functions could handle up to 2 input arguments instead of just one. Sample functions provided, GCD, LCM, Factorial, Binary operations on 16bits integers, MAX and MIN…

The source code to Taxman, one of the more popular Apple II games in the early 1980’s has been announced as being released very soon.   Hailed as the best Pac-Man clone available, Taxman plays nearly identical to the original Pac-Man. The original game was so accurate in detail, it drew the ire of the lawyers at Atari.  The game was a complete remake of Pac-Man right down to the animations which run between every few levels. Brian Fitzgerald wrote the…

Silicium Association have announced a new game for the Apple II at the Apple II Festival France 2015 event.  The game, “Nono et La Pomme Arc-En-Cel” or “Nono and the Rainbow Apple” is an adventure game, currently available in French only, but soon to be translated to other languages. As has been the trend lately of the French games, it comes in old school style zip lock baggy.  The game is available on 5.25 inch floppy disk. According to Antoine…

On Episode 106 of the RCR Podcast, Earl, Carrington, Paul and Ken discuss the Host’s Topic: “Second Chances:” If we had a time machine – What do you wish you’d done “back in the day” in the computing world, and is there a chance you can catch up and do it now in the retrocomputing hobby? Also on the show the team discusses Kfest, the bounty of IIgs related news that has recently been announced, more Kfest, some Retro Challenge results, some more…

The French Touch has released a new graphics demo for the Apple IIe computer.  The demo, entitled “A Question of Frames”, was produced on an Apple IIe with 128K of RAM.   It will run on original hardware, the Apple IIgs, as well as the Applewin, Jace 2.0 and ActiveGS emulators. The program disk is now available for all to enjoy at: http://www.ctrl-pomme-reset.fr/french-touch/ You can also watch the demo on video below:

After I gave a presentation on Retrobrite at KansasFest, people asked me to write about the process, never wrote about Retrobrite as there are so many articles and videos on the internet but finally found some time to write about it. There are many ways to Retrobrite.  I avoid submerging because it’s a waste of peroxide, and maybe toxic for the environment, also don’t wrap in plastic as it allows areas to wrinkle and get more concentrated than others, promoting…

From Facebook Apple II Enthusiasts Group: I know people have had trouble recently getting some of the old Byte Works products. I’m looking at a number of options, and wanted to gauge interest. All of our products that were produced at the Byte Works, and thus the ones we have clear copyright to, are on a CD called Opus ][. This includes ORCA/C, ORCA/Pascal, ORCA/M, and all of the support programs and so forth, but not ORCA/Modula 2. There are…