Atsushi Ushiroda has released an update for the Apple II Flex OS for The Mill 1.1 card. The update includes a fix to the ASMB command in which there apparently was an error in the SOURCE BUFFER address of the command. He has also included the Santa Barbara Tiny BASIC to the disk and has released a movie of the BASIC in action: The Mill cards as well as 68K cards are available from Nanja.info on their Facebook page at:https://www.facebook.com/groups/nanja.info/
Raphael Rezende has released a new game for the Apple II. Brickbat as he has so named the program is a text based Brick Out or as he says, “Arcanoid” type game in which the user attempt to eliminate all of the “Bricks” using a paddle at the bottom of the screen. This 50 line or so program takes up just seven sectors on a DOS 3.3 floppy disk and not only is very playable but actually is just as…
Anthony Beaucamp, author of the multi-platform 8-Bit Slicks online racing game, has announced a preview version which will run on the Apple II Plus, IIe, and IIc with 64 or 128K. According to his posting, “As well as support for 64K and 128K (single vs double hires), the game runs faster, has 2 new maps, and tons of small improvements. Apple II Enthusiasts Group Posting by Anthony Beaucamp The preview version of the new 8bit-Slicks for Apple //+, //e, //c…
Huw Williams of the EAMON Wiki website has released a new re-done map for the 93 adventure in the EAMON series, Flying Circus. With interest in the EAMON series once again rising in the retro computing world, Huw has been busily re-imagining many of the the maps for EAMON Adventures. For more of his wonderful mastery, check out the EAMON Wiki website at:https://eamon.wiki/ To read about the EAMON Adventure Flying Circus, check out the Wiki page at:https://eamon.wiki/Flying_Circus If you are…
Mark Jozaitis, who has become renowned for his transparent Apple II series cases, has revealed his lated re-vision of a classic. The Apple IIe Keyboard transparent model. In his announcement, he says: So what does a transparent Apple IIe with a transparent mechanical keyboard look like… Now you don’t have to wonder any more. Final prototype keyboard installed! Besides some issues with the font, I’m satisfied with the result. I even made frosted “Enhanced” stickers too! As soon as the…
Allen Greene made his ProDOS based Renumber.Pro source code available to the Apple II Community today. In the release, he says: By request, my source code for the basic renumber utility converted to run under ProDOS. The section with the labels starting with L were my initial disassembly of DOS 3.3 RENUMBER (the binary section of the Applesoft program). This can be assembled with the Toolkit assembler. From Facebook Posting in Apple II Enthusiasts Group You can download the source…
Ben Zotto dis a wonderful research article on the old Beige 1977 Apple II case color. He had a vial of the old touch up paint for the Apple II and started looking into whether or not he had the real thing and just how it compared to the paint color of the Apple II cases around today. He did a ton of work making swatches, comparing the ping on different types of paper and wood and then matching them…
THE FIRST A2SE PROGRAMMING EXHIBITION OF 2021 is here and it’s all about doing more with less! As a kid I played a lot of text based games, notably Texttrain (by Beagle Bros), various Star Trek games, Nethack (on an old MicroVAX II running Ultrix), various BBS games, etc. These games pushed the limits of how plain old ASCII characters (normal, flashing, and inverse) combined with animation could be used to create some amazingly creative, fun, and memorable experiences that…
The Virtual II Apple II Emulator has been updated. Gerard Putter, author of the Mac based emulator informed A.P.P.L.E. that version 10.2 of Virtual II was finally stable enough for him to release. Included in this release are: Inspector watchpoints can now be defined for a specific memory bank, improving their use for debugging. Added keyboard shortcuts for the main Inspector functions break, resume and single step. It is now possible to see the full path of a mounted disk,…
I have good news and bad news. The Bad News The time has come. I’m sad to announce that I’m closing Working Smarter for Mac Users forever in February. It breaks my heart, but it’s the right thing to do. Although Working Smarter for Mac Users has been my passion project for 4 years, and I don’t regret a minute of it, I need to be more careful of what I wish for. While I loved being in business for myself, it was a…
The 554th episode of the RetroMacCast has been released. In this episode, James & John discuss their latest eBay Finds including the following: Mac icons mug, collection of Steve Jobs magazines, and Chiat/Day newspaper congratulations. James also unveils The Macintosh Office, and news includes a tiny all-in-one Macintosh LC, Captain’s Quarters II, and NanoRaptor creations. The RetroMacCast is produced by James Savage and John Leake and you can join them for each and every episode of their podcast on their Facebook page, or catch them on YouTube….
Modern Apple ][ software development involves using modern tools like emulators, modern IDE, 6502 assemblers, etc. One thing I haven’t found yet is a way to create sprites for the Apple ][ on a modern computer. I’d like to share a tool I wrote that allows you to create hires sprites/bitmaps for Apple ][ using Excel (it also works with OpenOffice and LibreOffice). This Excel spreadsheet features 4 different editors that let you virtually turn on/off bits of the hires…
Paul Pratt has announced the the PCalc app, A popular scientific calculator is now available to run on the Mini vMac emulator. The app can now be downloaded from the Gryphel Project website, home of the Mini vMac application. To download the App, go to the PCalc page on the Gryphel Project site at:https://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/math/pcalc/index.html
From the europlus zone blog: I’m very happy to announce the date for the next WOzFest: WOzFest 18 will be held on Saturday 20 March 2021, starting at midday Sydney time (UTC+11:00). The theme for WOzFest 18 is “Community Service” – I’m asking attendees to bring something to upload to the Internet, to update an online resource, to do some Applesauce imaging on the night, to do some scanning, to interview a luminary via Skype…anything which contributes back to the retrocomputing community (it doesn’t even have to…
January 2021 The Technology Industry did well in the otherwise annus horribilis of 2020. Remote teaching, learning, business and personal teleconferencing, combined with the need to outfit and/or upgrade home offices meant that sales of computing equipment finished well after a short-lived COVID-induced slowdown. Preliminary indications to the third quarter show that Lenovo, GP, and Dell still dominate the Windows-compatible market; Apple is increasing market share, and Chrome books are now dominating the bargain basement ultramobile market. Indeed, if the…
Denis Molony has once again updated his Apple II Diskbrowser program. Diskbrowser 1.53.0 includes addition options for AppleSoft and the way in which it is displayed. For more information about Diskbrowser, check out the Apple II Diskbrowser GitHub page at:https://github.com/dmolony/DiskBrowser/
The Joshua Bell led Apple II Desktop project has released a new alpha version of the remake. Apple II Desktop 1.2 Alpha 23 includes a host of changes and fixes along with their bug numbers as reported in the A2Desktop project bug list: DeskTop Correct some problems with menus/windows after a failing to restore a window on launch (e.g. if disk is no longer present). #338, #339 Tweak list view column sizes. #321 Correct selection direction of left/right arrow keys in Format/Erase dialog. #328…
Diskbrowser version 1.51 has been released. The Apple II Diskbrowser is an Apple II disk image viewer created by Denis Molony, which runs on Mac OS X, Windows X, as well as Linux. It allows users to view the contents of varying types of Apple II series disk images including the John Morris created .WOZ format as well as .HDV hard disk images. Apple II Diskbrowser version 1.51 includes a host of bug fixes as well as additional Applesoft BASIC…
In the last issue of Call-A.P.P.L.E. Magazine, we wrote about Jean-Lois Gassee and his involvement in the cancellation of the Jonathan project by Apple Computer Inc.. Today in the Monday Note blog, there was a long memoir, written by Jean-Louis himself in which he talks about his time at Apple. “I joined Apple 40 years ago on the day of the company’s IPO, December 12, 1980. As I signed my employment agreement in Geneva I was elated, ready, and relieved.”…
Just thought I’d say Happy Holidays to everyone here as well as share an Applesauce update. I don’t come on to Facebook much these days as I have been in the midst of a multi-month long move. But I have been knocking away on the Applesauce client whenever I have had the free chance. I just released version 1.41 today and 1.40 last week. Anyway, here are a list of the more important changes: There are a tremendous number of…
