Ben Heckendorn’s latest video series is now covering the building of an Apple-1 computer from scratch. The Apple-1 was Steve Wozniak’s first commercially available computer and was sold initially by Steve Jobs through The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California. Ben Heckendorn is famous for his hacks of vintage and modern gaming and computing platforms. His videos over the past few years have come to represent the leading edge of hacks for these platforms. The Apple-1 shown by Ben in…
The programming group, French Touch, has released a new 3-Dimensional demo on the Apple II. The Unlimited Bobs demo was programmed on a Standard 1 MHz Apple //e computer and is shown in the video below: The demo will run in emulation on Applewin, JACE, and ActiveGS. For more information about the French Touch or Unlimited Bobs, check out the French Touch home page at : http://www.ctrl-pomme-reset.fr/french-touch/ You can also download the disk image in Emulator format from the…
A new Apple II game, Genius, has been released by Daniele Liverani. The game was primarily written for performance with emulators but has been optimized to run on the original hardware as well. You can try the game out on the Virtual Apple II website at: http://www.virtualapple.org/geniusdisk.html Genius is currently available for free download from: For emulator or Original hardware — https://www.facebook.com/download/852863848091025/GENIUS_Apple_%5D%5B_Ver4B.dsk The source code for the game has also been released and is available in an RTF format document…
REuters is reporting that an Aple-1 computer originally owned by Charles Ricketts is going on the auction block at Christies Auction House. The Apple-1 is fully functional and comes complete with the cancelled check from the purchase in July 1976. Estimated to go at about 600,000 USD, this particular Apple-1 has been owned by three people including Bruce Waldack and its current owner Luther Roberts. While other auction houses have had better luck with selling Apple-1 computers, Christies has only…
by Rick SutcliffeNovember 2014 The new iPhone six plusis just about everything Apple has touted–sufficient screen real estate, speed, snazzy design, plus runnable iOS enhancements to last for…well, the next year or two for some folk, though the Spy will make his serve far longer. Delivery took over a month from the order date, and except for a last minute glitch where the truck returned it to the depot (quitting time apparently arrived before the UPS driver did) was near…
A working Apple-1 computer recently listed by Bonhams Auction House has sold for a world record 905,000 USD. This particular Apple-1, originally sold by the Byte Shop in Mountain View, Ca., was one of 50 hand built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the famed Apple garage, is one of only 15 known to actually function. This Apple-1 will reside at it’s new home, The Henry Ford Museum. For more on the Bonham’s auction, check out the auction website…
On this, the third anniversary of Steve Jobs passing, we take a look back at the man we knew or thought we knew. Many of us had passing experiences with the one person who changed so much about the way we do business and run our personal lives. Where would the world be without the iPhone or the iPad or the iPod. These three items made our daily lives different in the way we enjoyed our music, our movies and…
Apple this week released the Gold Master Candidates for Mac OS X Yosemite and XCode 6.1 also put Apple in the position of asking developers to submit their Yosemite based Apps to the app store. The latest version of Mac OS X and also the development environment XCode are in the final stages of work correctly bugs and are expected to be released within the next couple of weeks. For more information, check out the Apple Developer news website…
Jeremy Rand has released Apple2BuildPipeline to simplify and facilitate making Apple II software on OS X with Xcode. Based on a project by Quinn Dunki, Rand says, “The big change is that I have created an installer which adds a template in Xcode for Apple II projects…So, the next time you are thinking of starting some new project in Xcode, you can think ‘should I build something for iOS, Mac OS X or maybe the Apple II.’ When you select…
by Rick Sutcliffe October 2014 iOS8 was introduced at WWDC with much hoopla but actually arrived with some problems, and has needed two updates since, the current one being 8.0.2. Also many users find it is too large to install without deleting a great deal of material from their iPuds. Hint: Use iTunes for the update. Given the usual spit and polish Apple puts into new releases, this whole episode seems odd, even a little Microsoftish–as if something has slipped there….
Apple released a patch for the bash UNIX shell to address two serious security vulnerabilities known as ‘shell shock.’ The updates don’t appear to be in Software Update and can be manually installed for OS 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9. Two additional vulnerabilities have been discovered. Those not wanting to wait for Apple, or needing to patch OS 10.6, can refer to articles on MacIssues or WonderHowTo.
The logn awaited return of the Wasteland series has arrived. Brian Fargo announced the release of the latest rendition of Wasteland, Wasteland 2, on twitter this evening. The game will be IS available through Steam as well as GOG.com. Brian made the release video available through YouTube this evening as well:
The crew at the Retro Computing Roundtable have posted Episode 83rd their podcast. This weeks panelists include Paul Hagstrom hosting the Roundtable with Michael Mulhern and Mike Whalen. This week the panel discusses a number of Apple related items including Which Apple II, if you can only have one? Why didn’t 6502 computers get faster? History of Personal Computing podcast Newly discovered Apple I up for auction Chris Osborne on using modems without a land line and his Level 29…
In the aftermath of the outrage over forcing users to download the U2 Album, Songs of Innocence, Apple has relented and created a website tool which allows users to remove the album. Many users found the album automatically added to their purchases who had absolutely no interest in the album and no way to remove the album from their purchases. The SOI removal tool webpage is at: https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/offerOptOut
On September 9, Apple unveiled the long-anticipated Apple Watch, to be released in early 2015. It will be available in three designs – Apple Watch, Apple Watch Sport, and 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, starting at $349 presumably for the Sport version. As demonstrated, it is clearly the most advanced and innovative smart watch, featuring a reimagined iOS Multi-Touch interface and a Digital Crown for scrolling and navigation. Beyond technical features, Apple has endeavored to make the watch very fashionable…
From Andrew Roughan — The next Australian retro computing gathering, Oz KFest, will be happening in Melbourne, Australia, April 17-19, 2015. Come join us downunder for a few of days of retro inspiration, Aussie ingenuity and camaraderie! The goal of the event is to provide a user group style environment to exchange ideas and discuss new developments in retro computing hardware, software, preservation, emulation and other related topics. There will be a few attendees of past KansasFests and Oz KFests…
Auction House Bonhams has another Apple-1 in its possession which will be auctioned off on October 22nd. While there are approximately 60 of the Steve Wozniak created Apple-1 motherboards, only about a dozen or so have been shown to work. Previous auctions of similarly functioning machines have fetched anywhere between 385,000 and 650,000 USD. The Apple-1 belonged to John Anderson who was the Founder of the Cincinnati AppleSiders User Group who kept the machine enclosed in a glass case for…
The developer of one of the most popular platform games of the early 1980’s has passed away. Lode Runner was an overnight success for Douglas E. Smith and had heavy competition from several publishers after he submitted the game for evaluation. The game originally was developed on the Apple II and became so popular that it has appeared on many of the later gaming platforms. His latest incarnations of the Lode Runner game were being published through Tozai Games.
The Apple2Scans Website has posted a scan of the Apple II book, Assembly Language Programming for the Apple II by Robert Mottola. The book is a 96 mb PDF and is available for download at: http://www.apple2scans.net/2014/09/01/assembly-language-programming-for-the-apple-ii/
IDG is shuttering the print section of their MacWorld publication. While there website will continue to exist and publish information, their print publication will cease to exist. Dan Miller, the editor of the magazine posted a note on Twitter about staying on for another month with the company, while others like Jason Snell also announced their own departures. Snell had been a writer with the magazine for the past 17 years. Another MacWorld writer, Ted Landau posted a number…
