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…
Long live WebberWebber is a powerful new web browser for the IIgs, that lets you surf the web and download files. Webber requires Marinetti to be installed. Webber is the successor to the now discontinued SIS. It uses the same interface as SIS, but there the similarity ends. Unlike SIS, Webber is a stand-alone application, compatible with System 6.0.1 through 6.0.4, and can download any web page that is accessible from an http:// connection. It does not handle https:// secure…
The 6502 Workshop team is thrilled to announce that Nox Archaist has been released! Journey with us back in time to the 1980s an experience an adventure inspired by classics like Ultima and Bard’s Tale. Lord British himself has traveled to Vali, the world of Nox Archaist, to help thee on thy quest! We would love to put a collector’s edition box in your hands, featuring cover art by Denis Loubet, or set you up with the Digital Edition. Order…
A new film about Apple co-founder Ron Wayne has been released. The film by Paul Johnson films, is appropriately entitled “Co-Founder“. The film covers the entry and exit of Ron Wayne with commentary from Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne himself. According to the blurb, “Ever had regrets about a business opportunity you took a pass on? In the 70’s Ronald Wayne and two young computer enthusiasts in Silicon Valley and formed a company. The two men were Steve Jobs and…
The global villagewas much touted back in the 60s and 70s. Better knowledge of our neighbours, countrypersons and those of other nations was supposed eventually to bring about unity, prosperity and a great love-in. The Spy has noted before in this space that his own prediction back in the day was quite the opposite, that the better we knew each other in an information age, the larger the divisions and even hatreds would likely become. He might today revise this…
David Schmidt has announced the immediate availability of the ADTPro floppy disk creation / bootstrapping software. ADTPro allows users to make physical copies of floppy disk images on all Apple II/III series platforms. Included in this release are the following changes: [Server] Switched out rxtx in favor of jssc for hardware serial port access [Server] Better “change working directory” behavior on Windows [Client] Special characters and too-long filenames confused the file picker – addresses GitHub issue #53 [SOS Client] Using…
IT’S BEEN QUITE A RIDE From back in 1984 when our lead developer Mark Lemmert first had the idea to write a tile-based Apple II RPG, to the founding of 6502 Workshop in March of 2016, all the way through today, the journey has been amazing! But now, we’ve got another exciting date to add to that list… WHAT DATE, YOU ASK? None other than the official release date of Nox Archaist! On December 12, 2020, all backers will receive…
