Daily Apple

AppleWorks

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Today, I wanted to use a spreadsheet to play around with some numbers.

They were personal numbers and I was away from home.  Then, I had a thought, AppleWorks.  I am pretty familiar with it and I usually have my tablet with me.  It runs Kegs, so why not make a disk image with AppleWorks and add it to the Kegs disk images.

I quickly put together an 800k AppleWorks 3 disk image and sent it through DropBox to my tablet.  It’s tiny, visually, but works, no mouse needed.  Just a neat little productivity tool.

 

Posted in Emulation Tagged with: ,

Ultima I

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I’ve been playing Ultima I, in Kegs, on my tablet.  I really like being able to play this way.  I can take it with me really easily and play on the go.

Progress was going pretty well until I failed to pay attention to my hit points and died in a dungeon.  That’ll learn me.

At the risk of speaking heresy, I wish Apple would come out with a small unit like this.  Set it up kind of like an iPod, so you could plug it into you computer and move disk images around like they do for music.  I was thinking something along the lines of those small 7″ netbooks.  I bet they could do it for between $50 and $100.  My tablet with a touch screen and keyboard was about $65 and you wouldn’t need the touch screen and really the CPU and memory could be less than the netbooks, yet still be more than the original.

Posted in Emulation, Games Tagged with: , ,

Nostalgia

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You have probably noticed I do a lot of posts on games for the Apple II.  At this point in my life, entertainment is the primary use for the Apple II.  Specifically, nostalgia.

When I originally bought my Apple //c, it was the only computer in the house.  I used it for serious stuff, like word processing, spread sheets and data bases.  AppleWorks handled most of my needs in those areas.

We used Print Shop for our specialized printing needs, like signs and banners.  Even an occasional greeting card was created.

I spent a lot of time online with the local BBS’s, because back then you paid real money for calls that weren’t local.

Finally, programming was a hobby for me.  I learned some in high school and the Apple //c gave me a chance to keep playing with it.

With time, newer computers got so they could do all of these things better and faster.  The programs that took the place of those on the Apple II have many more features and abilities.  The hardware likewise has more features and abilities.

I’d like to imagine systems built on a scale.  Imagine this, the ProDos disk operating system took up 35 blocks or a little less the 18000 characters on a disk, how big is the current version of your operating system.  Most are 100’s of megabytes and come on CD’s or DVD’s.

AppleWorks gave decent performance on a 1MHZ computer with 128K of memory.  What would you have with a 2GHZ computer and 4GB of memory.

I’d love to see what you could have if you were building a computer today and didn’t have to be constrained by older machines.  How about a 128 bit or 256 bit cpu using the huge amount of memory that they could address.  Design them from the ground up with the idea that it’s still not going to be enough, don’t cut back to save money.  (Remember 640K should be enough for anybody.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Apple //c, Games, Printers, Programming Tagged with: , , ,

Ultima I, Zork

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I’ve been kind of bouncing around between games in my free time.  I found Ultima I is more action oriented and Zork is more thought oriented.

I can now pop into Ultima I, for a quick 10 or 15 minutes, then save it and exit.  Later I can come back and take it from there.

Zork takes more mapping and planning and seems less portable.  I feel like I would have to bring my maps along, in order to play away from home.

It’s kind of funny, I was playing Ultima on break the other day the people were trying to figure out what I was playing by sound.  I wouldn’t tell them yet.

Posted in Emulation, Games Tagged with: , , ,

Zork

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I had some free, quiet time, to veg out this afternoon, so I loaded up my copy of Zork (I).  I didn’t play for long, but did manage to kill the Troll fairly handily.  It brought back some memories of good times.

I played Adventure and later Dungeon on the PDP 11/70 at school.  Dungeon was renamed Zork for legal reasons and split into three parts for business reasons.

Over the years, I’ve played most of the Infocom Text Adventures.  I have a copy of the lost classics for the PC, but had already owned several individual games for the Apple II.

Of them all, I spent the most time playing Zork and Planet Fall.  I don’t recall ever finishing any of them, but I did have a good time playing them.

I remember picking up a copy of Planetfall for the PC and my wife and I going in to work on the weekends, to use their brand new IBM PC/XT to play it together.

Off and on I have worked on writing a text adventure of my own, so as I played today I was noticing the writing of the descriptions.  It is a tricky kind of writing, trying to write enough to keep you interested, but not so much you loose interest.  There has to be enough stuff to seem real, without sounding like a list of stuff.  I always felt Infocom was really good at that.

 

Posted in Apple //c, Games Tagged with: , ,

Dukedom

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I was exploring Macgui.com today in the Apple II download section.  I was looking at different adventure games and ran across a Dos 3.3 disk called text adventures.  The directory showed what looks like seven different games and a disk menu program.  First thing I did was use the SpyGlass feature to look at some of the games.

One of the programs looked familiar.  It is called Dukedom and is a relative of Hamurabi.  I’d seen listings before in Creative Computing, but had never tried it.  I downloaded a copy and gave it a try.  I didn’t play for long but managed about 21 years before I got fired by the king.  I’m going to play again and try to win, but have some initial observations.

The game is in Applesoft on a Dos 3.3 diskette and like many games of this era is all in upper case, which, I think, makes it hard to read.  Additionally, I would clean up the displays and move some of the stuff around.  It starts with a summary and then a table of the information.  I would move the summary toward the bottom and then clean up some of the input routines.

 

Posted in Apple //c, Apple //gs, Apple IIe, Emulation, Games Tagged with: , , ,

System 6

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I have a wireless keyboard and mouse from Microsoft.  Instead of a little dongle, like the wireless mice have now, they use a big one.  It is about the size of an old style wired mouse and the wire is about 6 feet long.  It is a nice set, but doesn’t work well with my desk.

Over the years I’ve used it for different situations, most recently I’ve had it connected to a computer that was connected to my TV.  When I got my iRulu, I wondered if a regular keyboard would work with it, rather than the small one that came with it.  It worked, but surprise, surprise, so did the mouse.  It looks kind of ridiculous, a full sized keyboard and mouse attached to a little 7″ screen.

When I first tried out Kegs, I booted it with the System 6 hard drive image, using the little keyboard.  I realized System 6 really needed a mouse.  You could move the mouse cursor around using the touch screen, but that was actually kind of clumsy.  I tried the Microsoft keyboard and mouse, but the mouse didn’t work, so I set it aside for a couple of days.  This morning I was doing some reading on Kegs and found out that Kegs would use the mouse, but you had to press the F8 key to tell Kegs to use it.

This gave me the opportunity to explore the System 6 hard drive image.  There is a folder with shareware that is going to get a pretty thorough check.

 

Posted in Apple //gs, Emulation Tagged with: ,

Oops!

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I had yesterdays post all written and thought I had posted it.  Tonight when I came on to work on this post, I found I hadn’t posted it.  Now I have.

I spent the last couple of hours looking specifically for Apple //gs software.  I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just wanted to know what was available.

I didn’t see anything that really grabbed my eye, but plan on keeping my eyes open.  I may have felt different back in the day, when the //gs was a fairly new machine.  I went from my Apple //c to a PC back then, but still remember the excitement generated by the GUI of the original 68k Macs.

That is one of the things I like about the Apple II, its general lack of GUI, which makes programming easier for a text guy like me.

Posted in Apple //gs, Emulation, Posts Tagged with: ,

Ultima I

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This morning I downloaded The Oregon Trail and Ultima I to play under Kegs.

I spent about an hour playing Ultima I.  It plays almost as well under Kegs as it does on my Apple //c, better in some ways.  Kegs runs faster, so movement is a little smoother.  The 7″ screen is quite a bit smaller than the 15″ LCD TV on my Apple //c, but still quite usable.

One thing about using Kegs, is I am starting to develop an interest in the Apple //gs, which I never had before.  I may have to look into picking one up in the future.

I’ve posted a page on my iRulu 7″, with a picture of it running The Oregon Trail under Kegs.  It’s up under My Computers.

Posted in Apple //gs, Emulation, Games Tagged with: , , ,

Kegs IIgs Emulator

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This morning I had some time to look for the Kegs files on my Android.  Turns out they are buried in the Android folder under data.

Once I found the Images folder, where the disk images are stored for Kegs, downloading disk images for Kegs was simply a matter of dropping them into my Dropbox folder on my PC and then exporting them from the Dropbox folder on the Android to the Images folder for Kegs.

When you start Kegs, it produces a list of disk images and lets you choose one to start up.  It comes with two disk images.  The first is a 32MB System 6 hard drive image and the other is an X-MAS Demo.

The first two I tried downloading were Kyan Pascal and ZBasic, both work.

I primarily wanted to use this to work on projects, when away.  I am looking for a couple of good games to play with as well.

 

Posted in Apple //gs, Emulation, Programming Tagged with: , ,