Category: Vintage

The original manuscript for the book, Beneath Apple Dos is now available for Apple II historians.  Apple2Scans.net curator and owner of 6502Lane Mike Maginnis has posted the text to his website with the help of the original author, Don Worth. For more information about the text, check out the 6502Lane website at: http://www.6502lane.net/2015/03/12/don-worths-beneath-apple-dos-original-text-files/

Vintage Computer Festival East 10.0 has been announce.  The festival will run the 17th  to the 19th of April and will be held in Wall, New Jersey. According to their website: Vintage Computer Festival East is a hands-on, family-friendly celebration of computer history. It offers a book sale, classes, consignment sale, exhibit hall, food, lectures, museum tours, prizes, vendors, workshops, and more. The event is produced by Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists (MARCH) and is hosted at the InfoAge Science Center….

some years ago, I got a //c 9” green monitor, which worked fine for a few months, but I missed the color games. My options were connected to a TV (impractical) and also tried a small LCD monitor without success, as new monitors are 16:9, much more elongated than the traditional 4:3. The best solution was to get a replacement color monitor of the same size. In many forums asked if I could adapt Color Classic Macintosh monitors, Sony televisions…

Steve Nickolas has posted a patch which fixes the Apple II game Cubit on the Laser 128 computer.  Cubit was a 1980’s clone of the popular Arcade game Q-Bert and was long the bain of those users who purchased the Video Technology produced Laser 128 Computer.  A single memory location jump was causing the game to stop mid-stream as explained by Steve below: My experience has been Cu-bit breaks on a Laser due to firmware incompatibilities because it jumps to…

The Apple II Scans website (http://www.apple2scans.net) has posted two new AppleSource Newsletters/  AppleSource was an Apple dealer centric newsletter produced by Apple Computer Inc. The latest additions include the AppleSource 24 and the non-numbered AppleSource issues. You can download all of the available issues from the Apple II Scans AppleSource page at: http://www.apple2scans.net/magazines/applesource/

Gerard Putter has updated the Virtual II emulator.  The latest update to version 7.5.2 includes the following fixes: Fixed an issue that could cause the virtual procesor to get stuck in an endless loop. The right arrow key did not work correctly when used for game control. This has been fixed. Virtual II is an Apple II emulator for Mac OS X and is $49.95 for the full version.  You can download the shareware version or the update from the…

Gerard Putter has updated the Virtual II emulator for the Mac.  Version 7.5 has been released with Version 7.5.1 hot on its heels to fix an issue in the 7.5 release. Included in the two releases are the following updates and fixes: 7.5 Support for two Mockingboard cards in one machine, in order to listen to max. 12 channels. Corrected an issue with double low resolution colors. Added an experimental feature: the super serial card emulation can now work with…

Paris, January 6th, 2015 – Brutal Deluxe Sofware releases Merlin 32 Merlin 32 is a multi-pass Cross Assembler running under Windows targeting 8-bit processors in the 6502 series (such as 6502 and 65c02) and the 16 bit 65c816 processor. It is compatible with Glen Bredon’s Merlin 16+ syntax, including support for Macros, Pre-processor, Logical Expressions, Conditional Operations, Variables, Loops, Local Labels… It can build fixed position object code or relocatable executables (OMF v2.1) as we can find on 16-bit APPLE…

Virtual Apple II released an update to the Virtual Apple II database today.  Version 1.28 of the database includes a number of new software packages as well as updates to items recently added including a manual for David Schmenk’s PLASMA based game, Rogue. For those users utilizing the database through their ActiveGS Apps or other mobile based applications, you can update the database automatically through the notification which will appear shortly on your display.  All other users can check out…

Brian Picchi, the curator of the Tanru Nomad Computer Museum and author of the 2013 Apple II game Lamb Chops, has released his source code to the public.  According to his posting, “With the release of the new Assembly Lines book, I thought I’d share the source code to Lamb Chops which borrows almost entirely from concepts covered in that book. I wrote it in November of 2013 when I was first learning 6502 assembly language so it may be…

Dave Cheney has posted an Apple-1 Replica build project which utilizes the Arduino platform.  The build covers all aspects of the Apple-1 and is small enough to actually be inserted into almost any case.  The Mega6502 is basically a two chip Apple-1 computer improving in the same tradition of the great Steve Wozniak (@woz on twitter), reduction of the number of chips required for the computer. For more information about the Mega6502, check out Dave Cheney’s blog at: http://dave.cheney.net/2014/12/26/make-your-own-apple-1-replica

Nishida Radio, makers of the disk emulator, UNISDisk, have announce that all units have sold out for 2014.  No new orders will be taken for some time.  According to Koichi Nishida’s posting on his website, he needs some time off to deal with some health issues that have arisen. For more information about the UNISDisk or orther Nishida Radio products, check out their website at: http://tulip-house.ddo.jp/DIGITAL/english.html

David Schmenk, the creator of the PLASMA SDK for the Apple II has released a proof of concept game for the Apple II.  Rogue, an old school adventure game is intended to prove that PLASMA is capable of handling real algorithmic conceptual development.  David’s full release statement: To prove that PLASMA is capable of real algorithmic development, and looking forward to some Lawless Legends investigations, I built an intermediate project for your amusement. Harking back to the days of yore,…

The Virtual Apple II website database version 1.27 is now available.  Those users who are using emulator apps which rely upon the Virtual Apple II database for their apps and data can download the latest version.  This latest update includes new data for over 200 apps as well as a number of new games that were not in the previous version. Virtual Apple is an online disk repository for the Apple II computer which features disks, manuals, as well as…

Ivan Drucker has once again released a plugin for Applesoft on the Apple II computer.  His new Magic Goto allows for labels to be used instead of line numbers.   Accrding to his posting: Magic Goto is now available, so you can program in Applesoft without ever having to think about line numbers, yielding better organized and much more readable code. It lets you GOTO, GOSUB, or ONERR GOTO a label in a REM statement. For example, GOSUB “showMainMenu” will find…

Mike Maginnis, the curator of the Apple II Scans website (http://www.apple2scans.net) has made available all of the issues of the Apple /// related Open Apple Gazette online.  The Open Apple Gazette was the newsletter produced by the San Francisco based Apple ///’rs, an Apple /// centric users group. You can download all nine of the issues of the Open Apple Gazette as well as the Promo edition from the Apple II Scans website at: http://www.apple2scans.net/magazines/open-apple-gazette/

David Schmenk has posted an update to his self developed PLASMA SDK.   According to the posting on the Apple II Enthusiasts PLASMA for the Holidays (For all you programmer types looking to escape from the relatives this week) Just like last year, here is an update to the PLASMA sandbox (an Apple II IDE to play around with PLASMA). It is (sort of) self-documenting progression through some PLASMA example code. PLASMA has grown up a lot since last year. With…

The third section of the Ben Heckendorn Apple-1 replica build has been posted on The Ben Heck Show page on YouTube.  This section completed the build and shows how to build the case with the CNC machine.  Ben even tries his hand at entertaining the masses with his singing in this episode.

The Virtual Apple II website has updated their database to version 1.25.  The latest version contains dozens of new box blurbs and box covers as well as a number of new games including Daniele Liverani’s new game, Genius – A Rock Game. The Virtual Apple database is used by the ActiveGS App and other Apple II emulator apps to supply all the game information and disks to their apps.  To download the latest version of the app, click the update…

Ben Heckendorn has posted the second episode of his retro build of an Apple-1 clone.   This episode covers adding the keyboard and display of the data to the build. For those of you who missed the first episode, you can catch it in an earlier posting here at: http://www.callapple.org/hardware/ben-heck-building-an-apple-1-from-scratch/ The third episode is scheduled for next week and will complete the build with the case and other final adjustments to the build. Episode 2: