Streck

You were right. I snatched the power supply from my VCS and was able to test both Sinclairs a little. The ZX80 works perfectly! As far as I could test without loading any programs, anyway. The Timex Sinclair 1000 didn't fare as well - only the B, N, and M keys worked. At least I can still use its 16k expansion with the ZX80 for the time being.

One of my coworkers recently gifted me with a Timex Sinclair 1000 + 16k memory expansion, free of charge. The catch: no power supply or software. In my closet, I also have a Sinclair ZX80 that I got from my dad a million years ago (and I've no idea where he got it). No power supply, software, or memory expansion though.

I do I do!

Progress! The MPG crack of Dino Eggs has been found, and the Apple Mafia screen has been identified as belonging to the 1984 Mindscape game Crime & Punishment.

Oh, no, you misunderstand - I'm looking specifically for these cracked versions. For example, the Spy Hunter you mention with the PPG (Pacific Pirates Guild) crack is all over Asimov and other sites, but the only place I've seen the West Coast Connection crack is in this screenshot.

I have a bug up my rear about getting all the different cracked versions of games archived online. Back in the day, there were many different groups doing cracks of the same games, with their own unique members and BBSes. Recently, I looked through Jason Scott's collection of Apple II crack screens, and compared them to what was on Asimov (the biggest and best Apple II archive), and found that Asimov seemed to be short some. I contacted Mr. Scott, who very generously sent me a DVD of all the disk images he had, but it appears that some of them must have been lost since he originally placed the screenshots online. So, I turn to AA. The comp.sys.apple2 group isn't really the best place for this sort of inquiry; the wonderful folks there are more programmers and hardware hackers than gamers. I'm looking to know whether you might have any of these exact copies of games sitting around in your collection, and whether you might be amenable to ripping images from them (I'll gladly do it!). (this one actually isn't from textfiles.com, but a different site, and yeah, not a game) (unknown title) (unknown title)

Seems the IIe/c version isnt dumped. The 'Apple II' version available online is actually the GS version. The one here? ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/games/adventure/leisure_suit_larry/

Videos like this always make me wonder what would have become of the Apple II series if Apple had actually paid attention to it, and let it bloom to its full potential. As it was, they let it stagnate while focusing on the Mac, and the IIGS (while an awesome machine) was just too little, too late. Heck, just look at MousePaint - a Mac-style GUI for the Apple II was certainly possible, but innovation and advancement were stifled for the sake of Mac marketing imperatives. Here's a brief history of Apple's neglect of the Apple II - it's ugly and sad. Unfortunately, it's impossible for me to look at the latter half of the Apple II's lifespan with anything but bitterness.

BydoEmpire's thread inspired me to link this. I was infatuated with it back in the day. The giants of early personal computing, duking it out over nerd-trivia. You've got such illustrious figures as Bill Gates (who's such a happy kid in some of these), Mitch Kapor (the founder of Lotus and who gives off a strong good-guy vibe), and Bob Frankston (the mild-mannered and razor-sharp coauthor of VisiCalc). Here are the first four Computer Bowls. The second one is, I'd say, the best - part 2 is a really close game! Computer Bowl I, Parts 1/2 http://www.archive.org/details/episode_602 http://www.archive.org/details/episode_603 Computer Bowl II, Parts 1/2 http://www.archive.org/details/compbowl1 http://www.archive.org/details/compbowl2 Computer Bowl III, Parts 1/2 http://www.archive.org/details/computerbowl http://www.archive.org/details/episode_851 Computer Bowl IV, Parts 1/2 http://www.archive.org/details/episode_950 http://www.archive.org/details/episode_951

That's always been the case, I guess. The Apple II was more expensive from the start, and after the IBM PC was introduced, those two machines occupied their own price point (~$1,500 after 1981) until the PC took over. Compare that to TRS-80, C64, Atari 800/1200XL, TI-99, etc. I've been on eBay since '99 and it's been interesting to watch the gradual increase in market value of Apple II stuff. Heck, in the beginning, you could still find an original Apple ][ (non-Plus) for just a few hundred, as opposed to the $800 to $1,000 you see now.

Yep: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/index.php They're linked to from the DOSBox main page, so I guess they're the "official" DOSBox forums. They were very helpful when I was trying to work out some performance differences between the SB, SB16, and Gravis Ultrasound.

My DOS machine is an IBM Aptiva with a Pentium 166 MHz and 16 MB of RAM, running MS-DOS 6.22. Sound is a Sound Blaster 16, and video (for now) is just the integrated video on the motherboard. I have found this to be a fantastic setup for everything through about 1995. It's fast enough for all the shooters, Descent, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, etc., and perfectly fine for all the old RPGs, Apogee sidescrollers, LucasArts adventure games. And, in my experience, the Sound Blaster 16 is as close to a sweet spot as you'll find for pre-1995 games. There are a few games like Star Control II that are optimized for the Gravis Ultrasound (so sound quality will suffer a bit when run through an SB16), and other, older games that were designed for the original Sound Blaster (but the SB16 can usually handle those fine). For anything later than 1995, when 3D acceleration began to take off, you'd need to look at other sound/video hardware, but it seems like that's your cutoff point anyway. For DOS games, I advise against anything other than pure MS-DOS 6.22. I recall Windows 95 giving me some strange issues with those games back in the day. As for using '00s hardware... I can't imagine why there'd be a problem in combining that with MS-DOS, but then, I've never done it. I'm a stickler for period-specific stuff.

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!

My Boulder Dash has a hacked menu screen, which does have music playing in the background. Cracked by The Syndicate/1200 Club and The Cloak/Black Bag Thanks to the Whip Call The Safehouse 612-724-7066/16meg/multilines! Followed by the "official" info: By Peter Piepa with Chris Gray Apple version by Pat Montelo © 1984 MicroLab ® Licensed from First Star Softare :-o That's the one I had when I was a kid, and I've been trying to find it for years. I don't suppose you'd be interested in imaging it, or allowing me to do so (I have an ADTPro setup)?

Interesting - I bought a 2c off of ebay several years ago, and Mario Bros was on one of the disks (along w/ Montezuma's Revenge and Boulder Dash). It's actually a really good port. I'm curious to know what version of Boulder Dash is on that disk. All the versions on Asimov lack the signature Boulder Dash theme music on the title screen - except one, cracked by a group called the "Association of Broadcasting Crackers".

I have one of those sitting around:

Whoa, awesome find if that's a beta! Getting all the various cracks of a game archived is one of my sub-obsessions - maybe one cracking group's method differed from another's. And of course there are the different title screens, splattered with aliases and bulletin board numbers. It's about as niche as historical interest can get... but it's a valid one (or so I claim, twitching nervously). I also try to image original versions of software, where the copy protection is weak enough. I mostly use Saltine's Super Transcopy for this. NIB isn't the most desirable format, since it's pretty much impossible to write that back to a real Apple floppy, but at some point in the distant future there will be no functioning 5.25" drives or disks, and it won't make much difference what format the images are in as long as there's an emulator for them! Of course, perhaps at that point the Internet will have evolved into something else and all the Asimov mirrors will be lost, but let's not think about that. Yeah, I'm definitely not trying to shove you into the role of an archivist; after all, the beauty of the Apple II (or any personal computer for that matter) is that you can do as little or as much as you want with it. The Apple II has a charming sort of multiple-personality disorder - it can be "Wozniak", a playground for you to experiment on and hack away at, or it can be "Jobs", a polished, attractive-looking appliance that you can simply turn on and use for entertainment or productivity without thinking once about its internals. I just wanted to mention that the mechanisms for pulling/creating your own disk images existed, if you ended up being interested. My offer of doing the archival grunt-work stands for as long as I'm alive and mentally sound!

Looking at that screen, I do believe you have a version of Spy Hunter that hasn't yet been archived online! All the ones on the Asimov FTP site are the same PPG (Pacific Pirates Guild) crack, but yours seems to be from a different group. Have you determined whether you have sufficient hardware to run ADTPro? It can be used in the reverse direction too - creating disk images on your PC/Mac from the Apple floppies. It's an ongoing project/obsession of mine to image all the Apple II software I can get my hands on, before the disks finally deterioriate into unreadability. I then upload the images to Asimov, which is itself mirrored on other sites, giving this vintage software the relative permanence of the Internet. Judging from your other photos, you have a ton of software, and I'd bet a decent chunk of it isn't yet online. Where there's smoke, there's fire... If you have any interest in preserving this stuff, awesome - otherwise, heck, I'd probably pay for the shipping of those disks if you wanted to let me have a quick crack at them.

Absolutely! http://www.applefritter.com/taxonomy/term/229,135 Also, this guy was at one point engaged in archiving everything he could find of the Apple 1's original library. The page he had the software on appears to be down, though.

It was a combination of things. - The Apple II was introduced in 1977, three years before the CoCo. When it came out alongside the PET and TRS-80, the Apple II was the only one with any graphics or sound, and the graphics were very impressive. Programmers learned how to exploit the system's capabilities, giving it a big headstart on machines that didn't come until later, like the C64 and Atari 8-bit systems. - The Apple II's documentation was exceptional, and what the official docs didn't cover, the company was content to let third parties expose even more. This was a programmer's dream. - Disk drive, as you mentioned; the Apple II was one of the first systems with a relatively low-cost drive. Diskettes made possible larger, more sophisticated games than what you could fit onto cassettes, and of course they delivered better performance and convenience than any tape drive. IMO, the Apple II and CoCo aren't really comparable - they're different classes of computers. The CoCo was a "home computer" whereas the Apple II was much more general purpose: it was all over the place in small businesses, laboratories (scientists loved its expansion slots), and of course schools. The development community for the Apple II was enormous and gaming was one of the first pieces of that (due to the graphics advantage). This resulted in the Apple II having a gigantic software library compared to systems that actually sold more units such as the C64 and TRS-80. Many computer games of the early '80s were written first on the Apple II and then ported to other systems.

This is a thread about pinball simulations. They've always been one of my favorite kinds of old games - they could be pulled off with surprising realism on very weak hardware, and they had almost no learning curve. Here are some of the ones I loved the most. I'll start with the "Big Three" of computer pinball: Raster Blaster I know Bill Budge wrote this for the Apple II, but I'm not sure if it was ever ported to any other systems. If it was, I've never seen evidence of it. It's basically the Williams Firepower table, and Budge puts in some very satisfying physics. David's Midnight Magic As a kid, this one wasn't fast-paced enough to satisfy me, but I appreciated it more as I grew older. It's Williams' Black Knight table - more sophisticated than Firepower, and ultimately more fun. Night Mission Pinball Perhaps my all-time favorite. Blows away both RB and DMM for graphics and sound. The ball has trails. Definitely the most "arcadey" of the three. A couple of others I've enjoyed: Midnight Magic (Atari 2600) Obviously this one's already well-known to lots of AtariAge folks. IMO it's the only pinball game really worth playing on the 2600 - I've tried Video Pinball and Bumper Bash and they're just not satisfying at all. It would have been interesting to see a 2600 interpretation of the real David's Midnight Magic, though. Epic Pinball (MS-DOS) Remember these tables?? Android and Enigma were first-rate, while the rest were too simple, too gimmicky, or too condensed. They scrolled up and down as you went around the table, which made multiball a little difficult, but honestly I prefer that to the angled view of some pinball simulations. Here are the rest of the tables: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/epic-pinball/screenshots

Aladdin's Castle, Northpark Mall, Davenport, Iowa. The fam and I would go to Rastrelli's (a mediocre Italian restaurant attached to the mall) and I'd always order the same thing, Pizza by the Slice. Afterward, I'd go to the arcade, which was just around the corner, and I'd play Ms. Pac-Man for as long as my parents would let me. That's the only game I can clearly remember playing - it was right out in front, and I never got to stay that long.

Well, many/most disks include their own DOS and are therefore self-booting. Other disks don't, and to access the contents on those you'll need to first boot a DOS 3.3 disk, then swap it out for the other disk and do a CATALOG. (ProDOS is different, but if you're working with a II Plus I doubt you'll deal with ProDOS much anyway.) Yeah, I really wanted to link to a PDF of that in my massive list - it's definitely the best general beginner's guide to the Apple II that I've seen - but I guess it's a little thick for someone to spend the time scanning it. Also, I know this wasn't asked, but if you're interested in acquiring more software for the Apple II than what you already have (and if you happen to have a serial card of some kind, and some spare disks), ADTPro is by far the best way to do it. You can just download images from the Asimov archive and transfer them over.

Like Jibbajaba said - anything with an RCA video-in. New TVs still have this. Well, if you don't have a disk drive connected, you should be at a prompt. From here, you can program in BASIC (or 6502 assembly), and manipulate the hardware directly. This is the best beginner's guide for Applesoft BASIC programming that I've seen: http://www.apple-iigs.info/doc/fichiers/touchapplesoft.pdf There's also the original "Red Book" manual if you're interested in a lower-level look - you can skip the sections referring to Integer BASIC, since you have a II Plus: http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20(Redbook)%20Reference%20Manual%2030th%20Anniversary.pdf The assembler discussion starts around page 68. Here's a good set of instructions for installing your floppy drive (ignore the stuff about clamps): http://www.1000bit.it/support/manuali/apple/instdisk2/inst_disk2.htm When you get the drive connected, and start working with disks, here's a reference for DOS 3.3: http://apple2.info/wiki/index.php?title=DOS#Commands_quick_reference Lastly, here is the Apple II Reference Manual, which goes into technical detail about the entire machine: http://macheaven.net/MH_Manuals/apple_ii.pdf

Heck, I'd recommend two drives just so you had an easy way to copy disks. Technically you can do that with one drive, but it's a big PITA that involves a lot of disk-swapping. I think this is probably because the Apple II's reputation was more as a general-utility computer and less as a gaming computer. For a brief time in the very early '80s, it was actually the best system for games, just because of the sheer number of exclusive titles. But it was also the computer most friendly to modification - aside from the obscene number of expansion slots, the whole system was designed with a '70s electronics hobbyist mentality where you could change anything, connect it to anything, make it do anything. Scientists loved it (and it seems they still do!), and small businesses, and of course we know about its early grip in schools (the story behind that is a pretty good one). That all adds up to a gigantic range of uses, and a correspondingly huge library of software... so I guess it was inevitable that Apple II fan sites are all specialized and separate. I actually brought up your point on comp.sys.apple2 a couple of years ago - to deafening silence. That's the Apple II's legacy at work: the folks on that newsgroup are too busy tinkering and programming for that kind of project.