The Applewin Apple II Emulator has been updated. Version 1.28.4 was released as a bug fix with the following changes to the emulator: [Change #616] Improved accuracy for ‘RGB (Color Monitor)’ for hires. [Bug #611] Holding down F9 to cycle through the video modes results in occasional flicker with garbage. [Bug #627] Rainbow demo not working correctly when vertical blend is enabled. [Bug #628] Filename suffix check for .gz and .zip needs to be case-insensitive. Applewin is for Windows based…
MARCH 8, 2019 — KansasFest 2019, the 31st annual Apple II convention, is scheduled for July 16 – 21 in Kansas City, Missouri. Mark Pelczarski of Penguin Software, well-known for numerous graphics utilities, books, and games, will join us with a keynote presentation to celebrate the Apple II. Pelczarski began publishing graphics-related Apple II software in 1978 while in his early 20’s under the brands Penguin Software and Polarware. He is an entrepreneur, author, programmer, consultant, and professional educator. Mark…
The Spy’s Fourth Law reminds us Marketshare Lags Mindshare by two to five years. Long before the Internet was invented but was detailed here as the Metalibrary, the Spy warned that bringing people closer together electronically, far from creating the other pundits’ global village, would exacerbate old prejudices, hatreds, and uninformed beliefs, thus promoting division, not unity. This is exactly what the Internet has delivered–an echo-chamber platform for reinforcing differences rather than enabling dialog, much less promoting true tolerance. The…
John and James have been busy with a new episode of the RetroMacCast. The latest episode, number 288, includes a bevy of topics including: EBay finds: color ImageWriter II ribbons, Apple TV promotional display, iPod Red Sox. They declare their retrolutions for 2019, and news includes an Apple catalog graphic, Mac84, and VCF Northwest. You can find the latest episode of the RetroMacCast at: http://retromaccast.ning.com/
The 6502 Workshop team is launching a Kickstarter campaign on May 2, 2019 to produce a collector’s edition of Nox Archaist! Nox Archaist is a brand new tile based 8-bit RPG inspired by classics like Ultima and Bard’s Tale. It is written for the Apple II computer, but is easily playable on any modern Mac or PC via emulation. It’s been designed and hand-coded from scratch by a team of awesome programmers and artists, and even a few legends from the golden…
Hugh Hood, Longtime Apple II fan and programmer has announced a new TimeOut series product, TimeOut Edit BASIC 5.4 for Appleworks 5.1 Users TimeOut series products have long been the defacto go-to products for users of Appleworks with its series of timely and useful plugin utilities, designed to make the Appleworks a more complete package. While most users have long given up Appleworks as their production package, the programming arena is one area of usage not really foreseen as one…
In his latest Assembly Lines podcast, Chris Torrence creates a new version of Motter Tektura that is visually similar to the font used by Apple Computer back in the 1970’s and 1980’s. You can download the new font here: https://archive.org/download/AssemblyLinesPodcast91/MotterTekturaRetro.otf
The Applewin Apple II Emulator has been updated. Version 1.28.2 was released today with a few changes and fixes. According to the Github, these include the following: [Change #616] Support vertical blending for ‘RGB (Color Monitor)’ for hires. Support the old AppleWin 1.25 vertical blending for hires via a ‘Vertical Blend’ checkbox. [Change #621] Support RGB AppleColor card’s 160-color pixel mode by squashing 640 pixels into 560 pixels. Squashing is done by losing every 8th pixel. [PR #623] Do not…
Steven Paul Jobs, Co-Founder and visionary of Apple would have been 64 years old today. Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak, creator of the Apple-1 and Apple II computers, and Ron Wayne, the oft maligned and forgotten third partner started the company that most of us have come to know and whose products we all now use on a daily basis. While much has been written about Steve over the years both in the positive and the negative, yours truly has…
For those in the Apple community who were wondering what happened to the Nishida Radio site, it is now back online. Nishida Radio, run by Apple II hobbyist, Koichi Nishida, is well known for their Video adapters for the Apple IIGS as well as their UNISDISK Air storage and wireless card for the Apple II series computers. Currently, no products are listed for sale, however the main contents of the site seem to be fairly current. Also a product lineup…
Remy Gilbert has announced an update to his A2osX Multi-Tasking operating system for the Apple II. Version 0.92+ of A2osX has introduced a number of major updates to the kernal and APIs of the OS. According to the A2osX Github page, some of the changes to the system include: support of an enhanced shell support of many new scripting capabilities the ability to redirect and eventually piping output Current kernel also supports multiple virtual terminals Support for TCP (via TELNETD)…
The VidHD Apple II video card has new 1.15 firmware with many improvements and fixes. And, a new version 1.1 manual now details the firmware update procedure. Firmware 1.15 Changes: Fixed sync on 1440p, 1600p, and 2160p displays as long as they also support 1920×1080 or 1920×1200. Displays smaller than 1920 horizontal resolution will not work with firmware 1.15. OS fixes: Linux 4.20.8 and uBoot 2019.01 loader. MouseText: fixes incorrect inverse-checkmark font. Fixed a bug which caused Ctrl-Reset on PAL…
The Great Oz Retro-Fest, (GORF) is a multi-day event celebrating the personal computing platforms of the 1970s, 80s and 90s including the Apple, Microbee, Commodore, Atari, Sinclair and other 8- and 16-bit computer lines. GORF is being produced by Teaching Electronics and Computing History (TECH) Inc. which is an Australian not-for-profit association. GORF is happening from April 24th-28th 2019 at Urban Camp in Melbourne, Australia. Similar to KansasFest there is bunk-style accommodation provided on-site and participants are encouraged to live-in for the…
UPDATE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, I unfortunately have to postpone WOzFest 12:00 – the new date is Saturday 25 May 2019, all other details remain the same. Steve in Brisbane has decided to also postpone QFest 12 to the same date. From the europlus zone blog: From our Northern Apple ][ Compadres comes the following announcement: I am very happy to announce QFest 12, to be held in Brisbane on Saturday 27 April 2019, concurrent with WOzFest 12:00 and GORF, starting around midday Brisbane time (UTC+10:00). As with previous QFests, there…
UPDATE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, I unfortunately have to postpone WOzFest 12:00 – the new date is Saturday 25 May 2019, all other details remain the same. Steve in Brisbane has decided to also postpone QFest 12 to the same date. From the europlus zone blog: I’m very happy to announce the date for the next WOzFest, WOzFest 12:00 – Saturday 27 April 2019, starting around midday Sydney time (UTC+10:00). The primary theme for WOzFest 12:00 is “time” – encompassing, among other things, time-related hardware and software, the ravages of time and what we…
The Apple-1 Emulator That Doesn’t Suck or ETSD has been updated. The project receivd a bit of an update this week with the v6502 getting a submodule bump and the Apple-1 Emulator Xcode project file getting a version update. The Apple-1 ETDS is an Apple-1 emulator by Daniel Loffgren and uses curses for output. The program is freely downloadable from the Apple-1 ETDS GitHub page at:https://github.com/RyuKojiro/apple1
Gerard Putter, author of the Virtual II Emulator, has announced another patch release. Version 9.1.2 is set to address a few issues according to the author: It appeared that ProDOS diskette access often failed. This was due to the rewrite I did of the disk head stepper motor (to implement quarter-track access). In the new code I mixed up two variables, and as a result the head position and the stepper phase were not always in sync. This especially affected…
Now available due to popular demand is a spiral bound version of the Apple II DOS 4.1 manual. You can order your copy of the DOS 4.1 manual by going to our A.P.P.L.E. Bookstore. Be sure to check the discount code in the Specials posting on our website. https://www.callapple.org/books
A commit to the Passport Github today adds support for the MUSE Software RWTS. The MUSE RWTS can be found in games such as The Caverns of Frietag, The Function Game and other MUSE titles. Daikin5 RWTS support has also been added to the app. Passport is a tool which allows users to strip a disk of the copy protections, which have been in place for the past 30 plus years, with the purpose of giving users a look under…
The Virtual II Emulator has been updated. Version 9.1.1 of Virtual II is intended to address a couple of issues that came up in version 9.1. It is recommended that all users update their emulator with this patch version. Also, for those users who are having problems with the ROM not being found by the emulator on startup, you should be using the Application Support based ROM file for Virtual II to store the ROMs for the emulator. The directory…
