Studying the pseudo random number generation with a particle simulation of the binomial distribution using a Galton’s board in Double LORES. More information: https://8bitshack.org/post/marcdemo/ The simulator uses 96 single “particles” that are kept in constant movement following a pseudo-gravitational force which makes them move through the board. This simulation also demonstrates some of the capabilities of the DoLORES-library project.When a simulation run is finished “Gravitation” can be reversed forcing the particles to move back upwards allowing a restart of the…
The Applewin Apple II Emulator has been updated. New items in version 1.29.15 of the Tom Charesworth maintained Applewin Emulator include: [Change #764] Fully support the RGB cards, and introduce a new ‘Color (RGB Card/Monitor)’ dedicated video mode. [PR #837] Support for ‘Le Chat Mauve’ Eve and Féline RGB cards. [PR #826] Support for Video7’s SL7 RGB card. New command line switch to select RGB card type: -rgb-card-type: apple (default), sl7, eve, feline New command line switches for SL7: -rgb-card-foreground…
Seattle, Washington — October 23, 2020 — Apple Pugetsound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E.) is proud to announce the availability of a new manual for the “Beyond Quest“ game written by Bill Martens in 1985 and completed in 2020. Beyond Quest is an all-text RPG game that’s the most old school fun you will have with your Apple II computer. Adapted from the Quest 1 engine by Brian Reynolds, it builds on the original with a new backstory, objective, improved menus,…
This episode marks the end of the quest to play every single Infocom game by the EBAG hosts Kay Savetz and Carrington Vanston. In this 39th Episode of the EBAG podcast, Kay and Carrington take a bit of a victory lap after completing every single one of the Infocom text-only adventures. As they say, “Turn on verbose mode and light the brass lantern, it’s time to take a look back at what they liked best, and least, from these classic…
Disaster! On a routine lunar scouting mission, United Earth expedition 1 was attacked by Moon Bats, stranding 60 crew members across the lunar surface. It’s up to you to successfully pilot a Lunar Rescue Vehicle safely down to the surface and recover the stranded crew one by one before their air runs out! PRE-ORDER NOW! for $20 + $3 shipping, in old-school ziplock baggie packaging in 5.25″ DOS 3.3 floppy disk format with instruction sheet signed by the author. Compatible…
A new book about Sierra On-Line has been released by Ken Williams titled, “Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line.” Upon first glance, it looks to be a very informative overview of the inspirations and experiences of Ken and Roberta Williams at Sierra. According to the press release, “Sierra On-Line was one of the very first computer game companies, and at one time dominated the industry. The author, Ken Williams, founded Sierra On-Line…
John Snape has remastered the Apple II programming classics “Beneath Apple DOS” and “Beneath Apple ProDOS” and put them in one 450 page volume titled “Beneath Apple DOS and ProDOS 2020.” Remastering a book is no small effort, as I well know, and John has done a fine job of preserving and upgrading the work of authors Don Worth and Pieter Lechnner. Besides re-typesetting everything, he has redrawn the figures and tables. John also put his own special touch on…
The 543rd episode of the RetroMacCast has been released. In this Episode, James and John discuss eBay finds: Macintosh Portable prototype, interesting serial Mac HD, and Apple/Braun calculator. They recap the Apple Event, and news Newton, found Jobs audio, curved monitor G4 iMac, and more great NanoRaptor designs. To see all of the show notes and or to join the RetrMacCast Facebook page Check out the main webpage at RetroMacCast.
KbooHK has released a new Firmware update for his wDrive. Firmware version 1.0b5 mainly fixes smartport images that cannot be booted under the wDrive’s boot menu! wDrive (connect as drive A) has limitations with how it works with the Apple IIc when booting smartport images. When hdv/2mg files are selected in the boot menu, they cannot be booted in drive A until the selection on the adaptor switch is changed to to drive B(SMARTPORT). Under this circumstance, wDrive will use…
Walland Vrbancic has just released his latest version of Apple II DOS, DOS 4.3 File Management System. DOS 4.3 is based on his earlier release of DOS 4.1H in 2019. DOS 4.3 boots directly into Language Card memory. It retains all of the enhancements found in DOS 4.1 with many more additional features. Most notable are commands to directly modify disk sector data, update file time stamps at any time, control disk tracking to a single phase, configure eight areas of DOS that manage…
From the europlus zone blog: I’m very happy to announce the date for the next WOzFest: WOzFest 17 Oct will be held on Saturday 17 October 2020, starting at midday Sydney time (UTC+11:00). An easy date to remember! And Steve in Brisbane has confirmed QFest 17 will be held at the same time – double the Apple ][ goodness! The theme for WOzFest 17 Oct is, as it was for WOzFest SWEET16, “Community” – having supportive communities is important at the best of times, but especially so at the moment,…
We start September with great news from ReactiveMicro, the Apple II innovator that provides the community with modern solutions for our vintage hardware, like the Power Supply replacements for all Apple II and /// computers. The new product is a composite to HDMI converter, optimized to be used with retrocomputer signals like the apple II. As most people know, modern monitors, mostly the large LCD, OLED and large screens are created for large pixels (4 & 8K) while the composite…
Denis Molony has released an update to his Apple II Diskbrowser program. The Apple II Disk Browser is a JAVA based app which will run on all platforms and allows users to view the contents of an Apple II disk image. Version 1.48 has a number of fixes as well as new features for Text Files which allow certain items such as the Byte count of the file to be turned off. For more information or to download the Apple…
The RaSCSI board is now available for old Macs. You could potentially emulate HD’s and CDROM’s with it.RaSCSI is a virtual SCSI device emulator that runs on a Raspberry Pi. It can emulate multiple SCSI devices concurrently, provides a control interface to attach / detach drives, as well as insert and eject removable media. Simply launch the software, connect the RaSCSI interface board to your Mac and the devices will be recognized as physical SCSI devices! Currently it is unknown…
Apple and Tesla last week split their stock, the former by four-to-one and the latter by five-to-one. Since splits make the price of a single stock lower, such actions tend to attract more retail investors and this pushes the price up further. In the case of Apple this is merely the latest in a long line of such splits, now amounting to a 224:1 total from the beginning. Looking back on the initial IPO in 1980, this is equivalent to…
Note from Scott Harvey about Nibble Magazine To All fans of Nibble Magazine, Thanks to everyone who has supported Nibble over the years. As most of you know, my father passed away last fall after a very quick battle with lung cancer. He wanted me to continue the Nibble legacy as we continue on, and I’m excited to tell some of the stories of Nibble from a different perspective. The new website is up, and it’s a work in progress. …
James Savage and John Leake have released the 536th episode of their RetroMacCast. In this episode, James and John discuss their latest eBay finds including: An Apple dealer sign The black ADB Mouse II, A sealed copy of the Macintosh manual. Michael Mulhern the Joins the RetroMacCast Crew to take a look back at August 1990 in Macworld magazine and included in the episode is the news of the day including: Action Retro’s cursed SE, Fortnite 1984 ad parody. To see all of…
Apple II Email Suite Bobbi Manners has announced the release of the email//er Apple II Suite version 1.0. The AppleII Email Suite consists of the following six ProDOS programs: POP65.SYSTEM is a Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) client for the Apple II with Uthernet-II card. EMAIL.SYSTEM is a simple user interface for reading and managing email. It works together with POP65 and SMTP65. EDIT.SYSTEM is a simple screen editor, integrated with EMAIL.SYSTEM. ATTACHER.SYSTEM is used for creating multi-part MIME…
The Applewin Apple II Emulator has been updated. Applewin is a windows based Apple II emulator and many of the fixes in this latest version 1.29.14 are related to issues with Windows 10 and networking. Tom Charlesworth and his team, winners of the 2020 Apple II Forever Award, have announced more than a dozen fixes in their latest release of Applewin. [Change #822] Updated Uthernet card support to use Npcap for Win10. [Change #806] Added support for ‘Base 64A’ –…
Apple User Group Bulletin – August 17, 2020……………………………………………………………. This month’s featured vendor is O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly has been a part of the user group community for more than 30 years, so it is hard to remember back to 1978 when it was a small consulting company with a focus on UNIX and related technologies. By 1992 many user group members were reading copies of the Whole Internet Users Guide and Catalog while our more adventurous members were reading Programming Perl. Today, O’Reilly is an…
