Denis Colony has released the latest rendition of his Apple II disk viewing utility, Diskbrowser. Version 1.58 includes updates to the system level items and bug fixes. You can download Diskbrowser 1.58 for free from the Diskbrowser Github page at:https://github.com/dmolony/DiskBrowser
Gary Graham has painstakingly created a new OpenType Font Collection for Apple II fans – Apple II Pro. The package includes eight typefaces: Apple II Pro, Display Pro, ALT Pro, Display ALT Pro, and their inverted “Neg” counterparts. Additionally, Gary has crafted an impressive guide that details every aspect of these fonts. According to his documentation, “Apple II Pro is a vastly expanded version of the original Apple IIc and Apple IIe internal character sets, including MouseText, all combined into…
Technology News and Views Since 1983May 2021 The academic realm is often stereotyped as an impregnable, remote-from-life, unscalable ivory tower with little to say to the real world. The Spy’s corner of said kingdom is actually an ivory basement overdue for new carpeting and a coat of paint, and he likes to think his students are becoming well-equipped to tackle the real world–not just as it is today, but as it is becoming for the years to come. Oh,…
Welcome to Spring 2021. In honor of a friend of the program’s birthday and the new beginnings that await us all, A.P.P.L.E. is having a book giveaway. The books have been kindly donated by the birthday boy himself. Since he is in the giving mood and feels it is better to give than receive, he has graciously donated two copies of The WOZPAK Special Edition. You can Register by sending an email here! If you have not seen the…
The Nox Archaist team has announced the Pre-Orders for their forthcoming Nox Archaist Book of Hints. The book, chock full of hints and tips for Nox Archaist players new and old alike, was written by famed GameFaq reviews author Andrew Shultz. For more information, see below ———————–Begin Press Release———————— We are excited to announce the official Nox Archaist Book of Hints is now available for preorder, expected to ship late May! Click HERE to reserve your copy of the printed coil-bound edition +…
KansasFest 2021, the 33rd annual Apple II convention, is open for registration. Users, programmers, hobbyists, and retrocomputing enthusiasts are invited to gather virtually from Friday, July 23, through Saturday, July 24, for two days and one night of sessions, demos, announcements, contests, and camaraderie. The KansasFest committee is committed to making the best of the virtual arrangement and return in person to Kansas City in 2022. The keynote speaker, Robert Woodhead, is rescheduled to next year. Registration is $10 for access…
Matt Walsh has put together a website running on Will Scullin’s Apple II JS emulator. The website is coded completely in 6502 Assembly Language. The website, MDW OS v0.1.1, is Matt’s personal website that contains his resume, research papers, links, and other items. The Seattle based Matt, talkes about his life as well as the things that interests him on the website, which uses a graphic of an Apple monitor, along with the green text, giving it a complete Apple…
Kelvin Sherlock has released his Application wrapper for the MAME emulator. Ample 0.231 has been lined up with the release of MAME in the version number and runs on Apple machines with Mac OS 10.14 or newer. The release includes a version of MAME which only supports the Apple-1, Apple II Series, and the Apple III computers. Work is currently being performed on the Macintosh emulation within the program but as of yet, only a subset of the features are…
The Mac GUI website, owned and operated by David Finnegan, has released their list of Apple II related books for a bit of spring time reading. This list is a who’s who among the Apple II hobby community and really are good reads. According to them, the best Apple II books are: Assembly Lines: The Complete Book — by Roger Wagner, edited by Chris Torrence – All 33 of Roger Wagner’s Assembly Lines articles from Softalk magazine, plus appendices, in…
The Virtual II Apple II Emulator has been updated. Included in this release is a bevy of bug fixes which have been reported over the past few months including: Fixed several crashes that could occur if a Disk ][ interface card has no connected drives. Enhanced compatibility with WOZ disk images available in the public domain by correcting an error in version number checking. Extended the feature to speak lines on the screen; the application can now automatically speak new…
Preemptitive schedule for our Zoom Meeting 8.May2021– if I am missing some of you, pls. advise ! If someone want´s to give a talk in any future meeting, pls, contact me, or John HardyAbraham MollerTony LewisUlrich HoffmannDon Golding or just post on the group, you want to give a talk forth related, or you want to show us something. All of you are heartly invited to speek ! Even beginners to forth, or present yourself to the group. Is a pleassure to receive you. https://www.forth2020.org/zoom-meeting
For those of you who follow the 8-Bit Guy, AKA David Murray, on YouTube, you will be pleased to know he has introduced a new game, this time for the Apple II computer. PETSCII Robots is a game in which it is up to you to save the universe from the invading robots. You can accomplish this through the use of a variety of weapons which you accumulate within the game, as you attempt to take on the various levels…
The Apple II based Passport, a disk cracking package, has been updated — release dated 04-21-2021. The latest version of the Mark Pilgrim and Peter Ferrie produced software package has been released with the following changes: – NEW: patchers/harvey.a (Buzz Bang Harvey, Harvey by Primes) – NEW: patchers/jmp2012.a (BackAid) – NEW: patchers/pdi.a (Leadsheeter, Polywriter) – NEW: patchers/rps.a (Pac-Man Thunder Mountain release, Problem Solving in Algebra) – IMPROVED: patchers/ssprot.a (fixes Metric System Tutor) – IMPROVED: patchers/bb03.a (fixes Spanish for Mastery) -…
Kris Kennaway has released a video of the January 1984 Apple ad running in Full Motion Double Hi-Resolution Video complete with Playback on the Apple IIe computer. Now, before you say, the Apple IIe cannot do that, there are a few items you will need which were not available in 1984. First, you will need a 128k Enhanced Apple IIe running the software, also known as II-Vision version 0.2 by Kris Kennaway, allowing conversion or “transcoding” of the video files…
Anthony Beaucamp has just released his latest rendition of 8-Bit Unity game SDK. His Beta of the 8-Bit Unity SDK, version 0.4.0 includes a host of updates and changes. Anthony has posted the following in regard to the new graphics engine for 8-Bit Computers: After 6 months of hard work, I finally pulled the plug on new features and got down to fixing bugs. The result is here: 8bit-Unity 0.4.0! Hope you will enjoy this short overview of what’s new….
For those who love emulation, especially Macintosh Emulation, this one will be right up your alley. Kyle Fox has posted a picture of Shadowgate (Mac 68K version) running on the M1 Macintosh. In order to get there, he had to jump through a few hoops and architectures. The game Shadowgate itself was released in 1987 by Mindscape and is a game that offers a combination graphical / textual adventure experience that will not only entertain you but will challenge your…
Brainstorm Software and Brutal Deluxe Software have coordinated to bring Full Métal Planète for the Apple II gs to the masses. Originally released in 1988 by Ludodélire and developed by Hitech productions, the Full Métal Planète strategy game was limited to French until today. The English version of the Apple II gs game was blessed by Brainstorm Software and with the programming talents of Brutal Deluxe Software, it is now available for all to play. The synopsis of the game…
The Fr3nch T0uch hack group just came out with an absolutely fantastic 256 byte intro titled Terra Nova for the Apple II. The demo was for the Revision 2021 event going on currently from April 2nd to April 5th 2021. Written on the Apple IIe, Terra Nova demos a purely text based scroller with full Mockingboard sound track. It will run on either DOS 3.3 or ProDOS with the source code also available in addition to the binary. Revision 2021…
Cameron Kaiser has announce the end of development on the Ten-Four-Fox application, which provided users of G4 machines with Firefox Browser capabilities. As he mentions in his writeup, the costs of the operation are a huge item with about $600 per month in accruing by providing the application. To read further, check out Cameron’s article at:https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox-and-what-ive.html
With the announcement this past week that Volkswagen was to embrace the electric era by changing the corporate name to Voltswagen, the Spy decided to research the matter of pending corporate name changes and related issues. He made some fascinating discoveries. And, in an exclusive to this intrepid reporter comes word on internal debates at Apple between those who want to embrace the current name and are trying to sell the slogan “An Apple a day keeps MS away,” and…
