SoftRAID, the venerable RAID software solution, has been updated to 5.6.4 and is now fully compatible with macOS 10.13 High Sierra and also back to OS X 10.6.8. While fully compatible with High Sierra, it does not support APFS volumes – that level of support is slated for the upcoming SoftRAID 6.0. Besides supporting RAID 0, 1, 4, 5 and 1+0, one of the best features is the Certify feature. Certify can run multiple passes to verify that every sector…
For those of you who write adventure games or interactive fiction, there is another contest out there. The Spring Thing was announced and run by Aaron Reed and the entry deadline is 1 March 2018. Initially held in 2002, The Spring Thing is intended to be an event which brings interactive fiction writers together. This Main Festival Games need to comply with the following forms: New: your game should be unreleased at the time the festival opens. Finished: the game…
UPDATE: ALL COPIES HAVE SOLD John Blankenship, the author of Blankenship BASIC, RobotBASIC and a number of books has made a limited number of original copies (NEW) of his book, The Apple House, available. Originally published in 1984 by Prentice-Hall, this book explains how to make your house completely computerized with the Apple II computer. Imagine the convenience of having your “house” keep track of how many people are in each room and to turn off all the unnecessary lights….
David Schmenk has released his long awaited PLASMA programming language for the Apple II series computers. Under development since 2006, version 1.0 of PLASMA can be run both from floppy as well as from hard disk. It includes a bevy of improvements and enhancements with a number of people from the Apple II community taking part in improving this release. According to David’s website, PLASMA officially can support the 65802 as well as the 65816 16 bit features and can…
Super Mario Run produced by Nintendo has been iupdated. Version 3.0.7 includes primarily fixes to the popular app for the iOS platforms, including: ・ An issue where data sometimes had to be re-downloaded when launching the game has been resolved. ・ An issue where players could not get a Perfect result on some Remix 10 courses has been resolved. ・ Various other issues have been resolved. The Super Mario Run App is available as a free download from the Apple…
Adam Christianson has released the latest episode of his MacCast podcast. With everything going on this past week with CES in full swing and other news, this episode is packed with a lot of Apple goodness including: What you need to know about Spectre and Meltdown. Apple investors want more parental control. Apple clarifies store roof “flaw”. Even more Apple “shows” lined up. Iovine leaving Apple? Nope. Rumors of iPhone SE 2. No major Macbook Pro update this year? Apple…
An original Apple Lisa-1 has sold for $56,100 USD on the auction site, Ebay. The Lisa-1, a completely functional unit, is owned by Ebay user, professorinschubert in Karlsdorf-Neuthard, Germany. According to the story behing the machine, it was purchased from a collector who bought it more than 34 years ago when it was released. I got this Lisa from a collector who purchased the computer over 34 years ago and only turned it on a few times after storing it for…
espple is a new Apple-1 Emulator which runs on the ESP8266 NodeMCU LUA CP2102 ESP-12E Wi-Fi module from HiLetgo. The creation of Hrvoje Cavrak, espple is perhaps the cheapest physical hardware which emulates the Apple-1 computer to date and the only one to run completely wirelessly. The chip which costs less than 10$ per unit can be used to transmit the display signal via a short length of wire as a 60MHz signal to either a PAL or NTSC analog…
John Morris, creator of the Applesauce project, has released a preliminary version of the document outlining the new WOZ format for Apple II disk imaging. The format which was created specifically for the Applesauce project, allows emulators to more read the disk images which are produced by Applesauce as well as to write disks in a manner that is more accurate. Applesauce, which was highlighted in Call-A.P.P.L.E. Magazine V.27 N 02 , is a hardware solution which reads and writes…
Gerard Putter has updated the Virtual II Apple II emulator for Mac OS X to version 8.1. The latest release of the Virtual II emulator addresses a host of items addressed by A.P.P.L.E.’s Brian Wiser and others, as well as some items that were causing the app to crash. According to the Virtual II website, changes include: Added a preference to use the H.264 codec for making a screen movie, even if the HEVC codec is available. Added a preference…
While not a new release, Mini vMAC for iOS 2.2.4 was released in October and is available as an XCode project. The port of vMAC, the Mac Plus emulator, was released to the wild by its author, Jesús A. Álvarez, complete with source code and XCode Project build files due to the fact that Apple does not really allow emulation on iOS. Recent adjustments to the project include the correcting of the scaling of the screen just over a month…
When Apple decided to move all of its China Based iCloud accounts to a chinese based partner company, Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD) , which is run by the local government, it also swept up a number of accounts which were US based. According to TechCrunch, this number is low but all the same is quite unalarming to Apple, Inc. who just meekly points to the terms of service as the basis for this overreach by the transfer of accounts.
An email announcing the availability of the WiModem232 OLED version has been received from the CMBSTUFF website. According to the email, the WiModem 232 with OLED which C. Cooper has been experimenting with attached to his Super Serial Card for the Apple II, is available for purchase from the CBMSTUFF website. The WiModem 232 with OLDE runs $54.95 according to their website at: https://www.cbmstuff.com/proddetail.php?prod=WiModem232OLED
Rich Dreher, owner of R&D Automation, LLC. and the producer of the CFFA card for the Apple II has posted an update on the status of Run # 5 of the CFFA 3000. According to his website, I see an update is long overdue… I am still waiting for one more part from supplier Arrow. It should be here soon. Most of the other parts and PCBs are already at the assembler in California. I sent a out CFFA3000 Run#5…
Brutal Deluxe Software, known for its many contributions to the Apple II gs community has announced a proof of concept project. DOS 4.4 and MUFFIN for DOS 3.3 to 4.4 has been released and is available for free download from their website. According to the posting, DOS 4.4 is A proof of concept project For a DOS upgrade And you can download DOS 3.4 below… DOS 3.4 is like the OS code of DOS 4.4 with the RWTS routines of…
A minor update to the Virtual II emulator for Mac OS X has been released. Version 8.0.1 was released by Gerard Putter just two days after the previous release with a fix for an issue which was causing problems with certain platforms. According to the author, there was a blooper in 8.0 that caused the Apple ][ and ][+ to hardly work anymore. This was dues to an “improvement” in the 6502 emulation, namely the introduction of a “false…
January 2018 The Spy thinks he understands a little about a lot of things, and quite a bit about a few things, but he does not understand… Why some people’s reactions are so ridiculously extreme? Leaving ordinary politics (if there is such a thing) aside for the moment, and as detailed here last month, the Spamhaus reaction to spam emanating from a handful of servers at the NewTek/Deerfield/Atjeu facility was to ban an entire range of 65536 IP addresses. Despite…
The 53 page, full-color Winter 2017 issue of Call-A.P.P.L.E. magazine has been released and is now available for download for Members. Members will need to Login to access the issue through the “Magazines” menu. Highlights from this issue include: • The WOZ Factor: The Legend Continues in His Own Words • Great Apple II Hardware Products From 2017 • The Best Way to Preserve Macintosh Software from Floppy • Eamon 8.0: The Lost Treasure • CompuServe Shuts Down in 2017…
The MacCast podcast episode 639 has been posted. According to the posting on the MacCast website, this episode takes a looks at: the iPhone sales debate. Possible new Apple Watch features. Early benchmarks on iMac Pro. Apple responds to iPhone battery slowdowns. How to check your iPhone battery health. Follow-up on syncing bookmarks. Positive Apple support experiences. Moving Notes to new iCloud. Dealing with malware pop-ups. Some of my favorite things from 2017. If you would like to subscribe to…
Ken Winograd, a long time Apple programmer has announced the immediate release of his latest version of TinyBooks Pro. The program which gives small businesses a full blown accounting package has been under development for many years and is available as a one time purchase complete with upgrade. According to the press release: Merrimack, New Hampshire, January 1, 2018: Ken Winograd and Space-Time Associates announced today a major update of our ultra-simple Macintosh accounting and bookkeeping program called TinyBooks Pro….
