Got my old junior high Apple 2 programs working!

[BydoEmpire]

I managed to hold onto a handful of disks from all the programming I did in junior high. I used to skip lunch hour and stay late so I could work in the computer lab. Anyways, I bought a 2c off of ebay several years ago on a whim to try them out. Unfortunately, they wouldn't boot so I figured "they're old, too bad."

 

Flash forward a few years - I go the itch to pull my 2c out of the attic and was playing some of the commercial games I had. I was messing around this morning, and found a dos 3.3 disk that actually did boot. Hm, I wonder if I can read those other disks even if they don't boot anymore?

 

CATALOG

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.

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BOOM - all my old games and utilities! They all seem to work. Stuff I remember clear as day, stuff I completely forgot. It's a great bit of history for me, and it's interesting to see where I was as a programmer 20 years ago. Some stuff was pretty cool, I think. I wrote an icon-based interface for the A2 called AXIS - it was very static, no moving icons and such, but it did work. You could launch a few built-in apps and games, show contents of disks, etc. I wrote a whole bunch of D&D-style games of various degrees of success. The one I remember most, Quest for the Cudgel is really cheesy. "You are in a passage that reeks of rotting flesh. You can go EAST or NORTH." Every room had the same description,nd every time you moved, it just randomly picked two more directions to go, so there wasn't really a maze. Totally random and pointless, but funny to look back at. I just fired up a game I completely forgot about until now - SPACEBLAST, which is a Star Wars Arcade-style shooter. I need a joystick to play, but it looks neat (that is, until it crashed when a ship went off the screen)

 

I couldn't be more excited to have these working again! I need to get these transferred off the 5 1/4" disks, though, so I can run them on emus. I'll definitely post a link to the binaries when I do that. Don't get me wrong, none of these are really that great in hindsight, but for personal reasons and considering I was just a junior high kid, I think they're neat. Maybe I'll actually finish up some of them one of these days. Gotta brush up on my Applesoft BASIC...

[Mirage]

That's the very best kind of score.

[rockman_x_2002]

It's always awesome to go back and pore over old source code that you remember from days gone by. I have all my programs from when I was in college, which wasn't too long ago. I also have an old Trapper Keeper with a lot of my brother's old programs for the C64. One of these was a very primitive Snake clone for the machine that used the "P K , ;" keys for navigation around the screen. For the heck of it I gave it joystick support (this was before my programming days in college, while I was still in high school. I used the C64 manual and Internet for help). Took about a couple of hours, but I felt proud of the work.

 

I think I still have a printout of the annotated notes in that Trapper Keeper somewhere.

[LoTonah]

That's awesome that you were able to get those back, memories like that are the best.

 

I did the same thing earlier this year. Most of the stuff that I wrote in '87 and '88 (end of High School) worked, but anything before that wouldn't. Luckily, even as a little kid I was good about printing out my program listings and keeping them, so I have listings dating back to '79 (when I was nine, the first year I started programming). I've been typing a few of the better ones in again, just to have a few giggles

[BydoEmpire]

I've been typing a few of the better ones in again, just to have a few giggles

Yeah, I found a few crashes and I'm tempted to go in and fix things.

 

Has anyone here used www.retrofloppy.com? They're a service that transfers files off of old disks.

[Streck]

I've been typing a few of the better ones in again, just to have a few giggles

Yeah, I found a few crashes and I'm tempted to go in and fix things.

 

Has anyone here used www.retrofloppy.com? They're a service that transfers files off of old disks.

"$6.95 for file extraction and format conversion (per floppy side)"

 

Wow, I'd have spent a fortune by now if I'd used them. ADTPro is the way to go for Apple II stuff. It's allowed me to image hundreds of floppies, and the only thing I had to buy was a serial cable, to go from my Apple to my PC.

 

Oh, and I just got your message - will reply shortly!

[BydoEmpire]

Yeah, that's a lot for 30k of data (a lot of my disks are nowhere near full).

Edited January 16, 2011 by BydoEmpire

[Keatah]

This give me hope that some of my 31 year old disks will still work when I 'fire-em-up' this summer, along with a sider 10megger with all my bbs files.

[BydoEmpire]

Thanks to Streck for converting my disks! I need to clean things up and I'll upload the files when I get a chance. There are several duplicate versions of some of the games, and random data files lying around, so I'd like to make them a little more "usable" before sharing.

 

Here's my 2c, recently-removed-from-the-attic. Playing a game of Montezuma's Revenge:

 

 

And here's a gratuitous shot of my little budding programmer in action (he loves poking around on the keyboard):

 

[Keatah]

Thanks to Streck for converting my disks! I need to clean things up and I'll upload the files when I get a chance. There are several duplicate versions of some of the games, and random data files lying around, so I'd like to make them a little more "usable" before sharing.

 

Here's my 2c, recently-removed-from-the-attic. Playing a game of Montezuma's Revenge:

 

 

And here's a gratuitous shot of my little budding programmer in action (he loves poking around on the keyboard):

 

 

Suh-weet!! He needs a better computer though because his formulas are beyond the capability of the computer to process.. It even says so!

Edited February 28, 2011 by Keatah

[Goochman]

Do a google search on on ADTPro Apple - there is a program that will allow you to transfer your old Apple II disks to the PC for free. Takes a bit of testing on your sound card but works great.

[BydoEmpire]

I put everything up on my site. I don't have a joystick so I'm not able to test much, but feel free to check it out:

 

Quest for the Cudgel - move n,s,e,w through random rooms and fight random monsters!

Citadel of the Four Kings - takes advantage of 80 columns to presetn a nice screen.

Bomber - Canyon Bomber-style arcade game

Cryonax - Arcade flight sim

Sword Bearer - Arcade game sort of like pitfall, but with swords and fireballs

A.X.I.S. - I forget what the acronym was for, but it was a joystick-driven, icon-based interface for the Apple 2

Vilar - what is this game? I don't remember it, and while it's on various disks, I can't seem to find a working copy

 

http://www.zeyerband.com/vince/apple2/apple2.html

[Ransom]

Great finds! I'm so jealous you still have all your original programs. Now get cracking and finish them!

[magnusfalkirk]

I put everything up on my site. I don't have a joystick so I'm not able to test much, but feel free to check it out:

 

Quest for the Cudgel - move n,s,e,w through random rooms and fight random monsters!

Citadel of the Four Kings - takes advantage of 80 columns to presetn a nice screen.

Bomber - Canyon Bomber-style arcade game

Cryonax - Arcade flight sim

Sword Bearer - Arcade game sort of like pitfall, but with swords and fireballs

A.X.I.S. - I forget what the acronym was for, but it was a joystick-driven, icon-based interface for the Apple 2

Vilar - what is this game? I don't remember it, and while it's on various disks, I can't seem to find a working copy

 

http://www.zeyerband.com/vince/apple2/apple2.html

 

 

Just fininshed downloading all your stuff. I'll take a look at them when I get home, I've saved them to a flash drive. Glad you were able to recover all your old stuff. Can't wait to see what they look like when you finish some of them.

 

 

Dean

[Mock]

thats awesome...i still have a few 2e's in the garage...along with some rare hardware and books...i think i have all the stuff to a CAD Robot lol...boxes and boxes of disks...i will dig that stuff out again some day when i have time. There were some great games for the 2e and I remember spending countless hours working in Locksmith to break and copy games when i was in high school...there were about 4 or 5 of us in my town that were really in to it at the time and i think we supplied most of the others with games...gotta love the days before the internet when you actually had to get together and figure things out.

[jaybird3rd]

It's always great to look back over your old stuff--if you've been into computers long enough to have "old stuff"--and to see how far you've evolved from where you started. I lost a few little programs I wrote for the TI 99/4A (my first computer), but a lot of my other programs have survived, some of them even on the original disks. I have some Atari 800 floppies with some BASIC programs that I wrote when I was about eight or nine, and they all work perfectly. I also have some GW-BASIC and QBASIC programs that I wrote a few years later on the PC, around 1991, including a Scrabble game that got as far as a functional UI (designed entirely using graph paper and DRAW commands, if you can remember how those worked in GW-BASIC).

 

Looking over my old listings, I'm impressed at what I was able to figure out entirely on my own, but I can definitely see how experience and formal schooling have improved my skills. I can't say I'm tempted to go back and finish anything I started, but I know I could do it soooo much better now!

[zylon]

It's good you got your programs back in action. I used to do animated short cartoons on Apple II/e back in 91. Good times.

[Keatah]

I still have my modified Networks and GBBS and some other BBS printouts along with the "source code" original disks. Did them on my Epson MX-80 F/T with GrafTrax III printer. Just too cool. I've gotta get all this shit in order and make a nice website all about it.

 

As far as I can recall, I have not lost a single data bit (of things I wanted to keep) over the years.

Edited June 3, 2011 by Keatah