22
May
2012

The Xanith Diskette Company Sub Net

By

This past weekend was entertaining to me, as  all real hobbies should be.  There was a lot that I pondered as I researched facts, organized my physical media to virtual images, and experimented with my processes.  Lets talk about the set up first:

The Apples that were prominent this weekend were the Apple IIgs, which has dominated my landscape since I first booted it up.  Deep down in my grungy 8-bit heart, I realize it’s too versatile to ignore.  It was acting as a platform for ADTPro and was connected to my Ubuntu platform via Uthernet card.  This was depositing the resulting images into my Dropbox folder so that the images would be propagated across 5 separate computers and a server.  Then I got the idea to fire up my IIe, connected to the network with yet another Uthernet  card, and communicating with a separate instance of ADTPro on another computer that was also depositing the resulting image into a Dropbox folder.  The resulting process was awesome, as I was limited in copying floppies by my physical ability to insert the media and name the disk images.  I was strewing antique bits all over my network and beyond!

Somewhere in this activity I stopped to look over some of my old Newsroom files.  Newsroom was a successful desktop publishing software offering from Springboard.  The idea is that you are the editor of a newspaper and create content, place clip art, do the layout and print up the results.  I consider this software to be my first blog, as I often used it to create family newsletters.  It was amazing to go back in time a see that I had used this tool on the Apple IIe as late as 1994 to create a newsletter.  This made me think about the possibilities of creating me material with this application.  Something, that I will look closer into, as I think I have a way to create a Newsroom product without too much hassle.

I have also been interested in starting a Apple Cat II board, just for the hell of it, but again I am getting into tangents. I was thinking about a SynchroNet BBS I had for a while called The Xanith Diskette Company Sub Net. There wasn’t a lot of activity, mostly me and my brother screwing around on it while he was overseas. I have a good idea about a theme for the board, and you may say that’s dated or whatnot, but what I liked about some of the Apple Boards is that they carried a theme sometimes and it seemed to make it a more interesting place. I don’t know what I will use the board for exactly, and I guess that would depend if I could get a few users. I have this idea that I can’t determine that is would be some sort of software collective type situation, for anything you could create on the Apple II platform. And I mean anything. It’s fun to bang around on an acient platform, but it’s even more fun when you can show your work, and maybe learn a thing or two in the process. Don’t look for it, because like so many others, the Xanith Company Sub Net is gone for now, and that’s a shame. Why? Well, I wanted animate some ASCII and I ended up making the Intro page for their diskettes. I thought I would share it.  If you want to run it on real hardware, you will need 80-columns available.

You can download a disk image or you can launch it in your Browser.

Download Xanith Sub Net Intro disk (Right Click => Save Link As).

Launch Xanith Subnet Intro floppy in Browser

Extreme closeup of floppy disk.

Serial Number PT001, 1982

Category: Apple II Notes  Leave a Comment
19
May
2012

Storage

By

I am continuing the archival of my Apple II disks.  I go from disk to disk and when I find one that was used as data storage, I jump ahead of my planned procedure and look at the data.  I can’t help it.  I am an AppleWorks guy when it comes to vintage Apple II Word Processing, although someday I’d like to make some notes as to other varieties.  The reason is simply that I “got” AppleWorks when I was using it and there wasn’t a lot of hidden commands to remember to get it to do the basic things you needed done.  This is the transcript of an .AWP file I came across an unlabeled floppy whose disk directory was entitled “Storage”.

*                    *                    *

     The first time I was crazy I lay in the floor for hours.  It was the first time I listened to my own laughter, staring across the stained floor of my dormitory room, through the shards of broken glass, the fourteen mattresses of my bed casting the hazy afternoon sun’s shadow on me.  there was always the footsteps of people walking outside the square hall, passing the room, and I had lain there so long I could recognize who they were by the sound of their gait.  In the morning, whichever morning it was that I had waken, I smashed the bottle of Southern Comfort that was in my bed against the other bottles collecting in my room.  That was the last thing I actually did.  At least that was the last thing I actually remember.

That was years ago.

Maybe it was years ago, because I can only remember today, and the dreams I had last night.  I only allow myself to remember today and the dreams.  I doubt I could survive if I didn’t.  And yesterday?  What of yesterday?

Yesterday was only true at the time.  To guide your life by the things you said or believed yesterday can only lead to your ruin.  People don’t.  Oh sure, they say the things you remember them saying yesterday or six weeks ago, but they never mean them.  Not as much as when it first occurred to them.  When they repeat it, it’s more for the sake of their own nostalgia, for if they have a past, then somehow they become more real today.  I haven’t had that problem since I got up off the floor.

That wasn’t the letter William really planned to send to his mother.  He really didn’t even know why he wrote it.  Today, however, he knew that it was the pen trying to betray him.  Pens always had that characteristic and given the least chance, they could always lead to your undoing.  Time and care went into everything William wrote or said.  Oh yes, William knew that the tongue was just as difficult a compatriot as the pen, but to survive you just had to know how to coax them into submission.

William lifted the pages from his writing tablet and removed them.  He took the next blank page, tore it out and ripped it up.  Carrying the pages that the pen had written, he went to the closet, unlocked it, and took out the milk crate where he kept the papers that other pens had written.  When he had the new pages filed, he locked the closet, and went back to the kitchen table to throw the treacherous pen away.

He stopped by the refrigerator and looked in at milk containers.  There were twelve of them and they were the only objects in the refrigerator, besides a dozen or so avocados that rolled sightly on the shelf.  They used to be filled with milk but now they contained avocado juice.  It had taken him hours to fill the containers.  He used the money from the last paycheck he received from being Kroger’s bag boy to buy an electric juicer.  William poured himself a glass of the thick, green liquid and wondered why he hadn’t realized years ago that all life runs on simple sugars, and that must be the easiest fuel for the body to break down.  With all the wear and tear he would save by only consuming simple sugars, he may live forever.  He tried the same principle last week with beer, but he couldn’t remember much about it except the vomit.  There was still a stain on the couch he couldn’t remove.

*                     *                   *

I have no idea where I was going with that story,  I think that the gist of it was a exercise showing a writer slowly losing his sanity and bringing everyone around him into the void.  Now that I’m older, there’s not a lot of appeal to following this start through.  People can get it into their minds, how things are going to be in the world, and sometimes they have no basis.  It can be a painful process to watch, and the worst part is the ability of the mind to rationalize.  You mind wants everything to have a reason, and if no reason is apparent, it will create it’s own reasons that actions have transpired, which is just as illogical as the original series of events.

You know, I like the tautology of that last thought.

Maybe I will continue the story.

Category: Apple II Notes  Leave a Comment
18
May
2012

State of the Apples

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I have had quite a bit of Apple II activity, but haven’t written about it.  I feel that I should make an entry, though, for two reasons.  The first reason is to solidify amorphous, ephemeral, short term project ideas I have.  The second is to share them with you, and maybe get a random comment that lets me see things from a different perspective.

Let’s talk about how and what I am working.  I have the IIGS up and running and am primarily using it to transfer actual Apple II disks in to disk images.  These are the same disks that you may have read about in my previous e-log.  I had a catastrophic file system failure that left me hurting and bitter and almost misanthropic enough to take up fly fishing, but somehow I managed the strength to carry on.  So I am now archiving my original disks locally and via CrashPlan back ups, DropBox, SkyDrive, GoogleDrive, and Ubuntu Unity.  Not counting CrashPlan, I have managed to wrangle about 25GB of free cloud storage.  I imagine that the free cloud storage business has an Eric Cartman-type plan that goes along the line of “Hey guys, give me your info, I’ll hold it for you,” followed by, “Hey guys, I have your info.  Times are tough.  I am holding it hostage, what’s it worth to you?” Between the choices, though, I have distributed the info.  Informational survivalism is like evolution in that the information that adapts it’s form to it’s environment and propagates widely has better odds of surviving in the long term.  I really am enjoying the DropBox DiskBox that I have set up.  I can use emulation to work on hard disk setups and to update across platforms and locations.  If I have an idea, I have instant access to my disk images.

The second thing I have been thinking about is setting up a Cat-fur board, and last week I was actually working to this end.  I was hoping that I could make a connection with a willing Apple-Cat II owner / volunteer and test the system.  I’d also like to work out a way to keep the board up 24/7 but right now the idea I have is that is would have calling hours, but I haven’t solidified that idea as of yet.  I have some ideas for the board, but again I don’t want to get ahead of myself.  I should probably develop this idea as some kind of Retro Challenge.  Early testing though has proven problematic as I have to major roadblocks.

The first obstacle is this:  I have an order in for an undisclosed CF Drive for the Apple II’s that has been outstanding since last November with no clarification as to order status, which is depressing, but understandable, since I expect few things move quickly in the retro world, so the hard drive for the system is up in the air. But here is the thing that gets me.  I am interested in 2 CF card readers.  I have asked to be on the waiting list for one brand, I’ve crossed the six month mark waiting for the other brand, and I am considering ordering a second CF card from anyone that I can get to take my money.  Do I sound desperate?  Because I kinda am.

The second problem that I have to overcome is that three of my Disk II hard drives seem it have stopped reading/seeking floppy data.  My Duo Disk sees the info, but various combinations between the Apple IIe and Apple II+, 2 separate drive controllers and the 3 Disk II drives have proven fruitless.  All have failed overnight.  It’s puzzling and I am now researching how to troubleshoot this.

If I can overcome my data storage and retrieval issues, I can begin to live the dream that all healthy young lads strive for the opportunity to be found fit for:  Apple-Cat II Sysop. For now, though, I am going to be tinkering way at the mundane task of troubleshooting my gear.

Another thing that I have found immensely satisfying for personal reasons was a task I underwent to give me a better idea obout the Apple II timeline.  I have been operating under an untrue but understandable assumption that I know a lot about how the Apple II period went down.  I am kind of being funny there, as really, I have to do a lot of research to find things out.  I was kind of isolated, and I know how things went down on my desert island, but I don’t have good perspective overall.  One of the things I did to remedy that was to make an excel spreadsheet by year that corresponds to A2 History’s time line for software and hardware.  This is a work in progress and as I find new information and have time to do so, I add entries into the spread sheet.  In reality I should begin a database along side.  In many instances I was surprised by the actual dates that things were released and when I experienced them.  This project also gave me more clarity on the programmers that created some of my favorite software, and showed me how I gravitated to certain programmers without knowing they were responsible for the offerings.  Each programmer is very distinctive, like each author, each song writer, each band, and are somehow able to create artifacts that you enjoy rediscovering time and time again.  It also is helping me make my Apple set-up more anachronism free, which jangles my nerves when I realize them.  I am also going to a point when I am categorizing my physical floppies by year of release and only want to operate software on the temporally sensible machine for the job.

Finally I am going to put this here:

Last night I woke up from a dream.  In the dream I was watching a history of Apple II Software.  The documentary detailed the first software protection schemes and also talked about software firsts that occurred in Apple II software and continued to be used today.  The dream/film was incredibly interesting to me and when I awoke, I realized that maybe I had been spending too much time looking at the Top Software by Year at A2 History.

Category: Apple II Notes, BBS, Emulation  Leave a Comment
10
May
2012

AppleSoft Magnum Opus

By 
It was February 26th, 1986, Third Period Computer Basic Class.  This
was the day I would write my greatest program ever.  What it lacks in
actual program content, it more than makes up for in setting the stage
for the antagonistic relationship I was developing with the instructor.
I only had to print it a few times for debugging purposes to seal the
deal for the rest of the semester.

 1  REM  *********************************************************
 2  REM  *                                                       *
 3  REM  *                   Copyright (c) 1986                  *
 4  REM  *    Xanith Diskette Company and/or its affiliates.     *
 5  REM  *                   All rights reserved.                *
 6  REM  *                                                       *
 7  REM  *  Redistribution and use in source and binary forms,   *
 8  REM  *  with or withoutmodification, are permitted provided  *
 9  REM  *  that the following conditions are met:               *
10  REM *                                                       *
11  REM * -Redistributions of source code must retain the above *
12  REM *  copyright notice, this list of conditions and the    *
13  REM *  following disclaimer.                                *
14  REM *                                                       *
15  REM * -Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the    *
16  REM *  above copyright notice, this list of conditions and  *
17  REM *  the following disclaimer in the documentation and/o  *
18  REM *  other materials provided with the distribution.      *
19  REM *                                                       *
20  REM * -Neither the name of Xanith Diskette Company or the   *
21  REM *  names of its contributors may be used to endorse     *
22  REM *  or promote products derived from this software       *
23  REM *  without specific prior written permission.           *
24  REM *                                                       *
25  REM * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND*
26  REM * CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED       *
27  REM * WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED*
28  REM * WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A       *
29  REM * PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL *
30  REM * THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY *
31  REM * DIRECT, INDIRECT, *INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR *
32  REM * CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING,BUT NOT LIMITED TO,  *
33  REM * PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF  *
34  REM * USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOW- *
35  REM * EVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN*
36  REM * CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING        *
37  REM * NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE*
38  REM * USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSS-    *
39  REM * IBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.                               *
40  REM *                                                       *
41  REM * The SUMS program impliments an application that simply*
42  REM * allows a third party (hereby referred to as "user") to*
43  REM * assign numeric values to variables, which are held in *
44  REM * memory, called upon, and used to calculate a total    *
45  REM * sum.  No claim of ownership will be brought against   *
46  REM * the user values and such intent is neither implied or *
47  REM * expressed for the term in which the user values are   *
48  REM * contained in memory.                                  *
49  REM *                                                       *
50  REM *                                                       *
51  REM *                     SUMS                              *
52  REM *                                                       *
53  REM *                      by                               *
54  REM *               Daniel McLaughlin                       *
55  REM *                  Third Period                         *
56  REM *               February 26, 1986                       *
57  REM *                                                       *
58  REM *                   STARRING                            *
59  REM *                     The                               *
60  REM *               DECLARED VARIABLES                      *
61  REM *         A$ as User Numeric Input No. 1                *
62  REM *         B$ as User Numeric Input No. 2                *
63  REM *                                                       *
64  REM *********************************************************
65  INPUT "INPUT THE FIRST NUMBER => ";A
66  INPUT "INPUT THE SECOND NUMBER => ";B
67  C = A + B
68  PRINT  
69  PRINT A;" + ";B;" = ";C
70  FOR I = 1 TO 2500 : NEXT I
71  TEXT  : HOME
72  END
Category: Apple II Notes, Software  One Comment
06
May
2012

Fantasy Wargaming

By

It’s was no secret at the time, that I spent an inordinate amount of my attention to creating fantasy worlds to explore.  I guess it’s no secret now, either.  So why am I blurting this out now?  I was cleaning and organizing things, trying to reign in my uncontrolled accumulation of stuff, and opening up my Applesoft textbook from high school, entitled “A Guide to Programming in Applesoft” by Bruce Presley.  I remember the class.  It was taught by an abnormally masculine girls sports coach, and was pretty much a sleeper class for me.  I remember that the instructor (who may have only paged through the textbook that summer) had a problem with me keying in “?” for print statements.  That was the first time it was suspected that I may be engaging in hacker-like activities.  I never did show her that I could edit my code with ESC + I,J,K,M.  Oh well.

At this time, it was my dream to capture lightning in a bottle and pick up where Richard Garriott left off.  It’s true, I was going to be the next Fantasy Wargaming superstar.  “Fantasy Wargaming” was a book by Bruce Cordell that I found infinitely more interesting than all other D&D books, with the exception of the “Grimtooth’s Traps” series for 2 reasons: The first was that depth of historical detail and breadth of research that went into compiling the source material for the gaming rules.  It’s seemed every detail was covered, and actually led me into reading historical thesis based on medieval day to day activities.  The second is that the rules were not coherent and complete nor were they by any means playable in any enjoyable fashion.  It took me a while to catch on to that second fact, but in the mean time, I would continue to operate in my deluded milleu, trying to eke out a playable game.  As other students learned how to make student rosters, and report semester grades, I worked on making a gaming master piece.

So why haven’t you heard of this marvelous endeavor?  Because, as I just discovered, it only exists on a few sheets of paper jammed in my High School text book.

I present the hand written notes for Fantasy Wargaming, scribbled during my Computer Basics class of the 1984 Fall semester.

Fantasy Wargaming Programming Notes

Category: Apple II Notes  One Comment
28
Apr
2012

Bring Your Apple II Work

By

Yesterday, I had mentioned that I had brought an Apple IIc Plus as a cube-side companion.  I had set it up, using a DVD player as a LCD display.  The display is highly portable, but the dispaly quality definitely takes a hit.  The big benefit is that the whole deal can jam into a reasonably sized laptop bag, you know,  for the Apple II ambassador to the world on the go.  Setting up the serial video streaming rig is straight forward:  RS-232 compatible connection from your PC connected to a IIc MiniDIN8 connection (Trivia:  The RS in RS-232 stands for Recommended Standard.  Early on, this was a +/-10vdc signal that sometime got driven at lower signal levels and lead to communication problems.  Soon a +/-5vdc driver appeared and became known as RS-232 compatible).  That’s about it on the hardware side, so let’s review the inventory:  An Apple IIc, a display of some type, an Apple IIc serial connection (RS-232 DSub-9 to MiniDIN8 cable.  You’ll want one for ADTPro anyway,  available here).

On the software side, your are going to need vnIIc.  The software is step by step easy, and the site does a great job of documenting what you need to do.

Earlier this week, I covertly deployed this rig in the cube at work.  I experimented with single frame displays, and streaming the YouTube corporate video channel.  I need a better monitor, though, as the little LCD isn’t very crisp.

An idea was brought up to video the exercise and post it to YouTube, poetically bringing the whole thing full circle.  Armed with a few spare minutes and my n900, I set out to get some mediocre shots and fix the whole thing in post production.  I need a steady cam.

The Resulting Video is hereby tendered for your review.

 

Category: Apple II Notes  Leave a Comment
18
Apr
2012

Binary Hexarhythms

By

I have begun reading a book entitled “Artificial Intelligence on the Apple II”.  It is interesting to me and does a reasonable job of explaining the workings of it’s schemes as far as informational management.  Concurrently, I am also looking at a few Nibble Books that I purchased from Mike Harvey.  I haven’t met the man, but he has always been quite personable in e-mails and I have found his products to be of great value to me.  Particularly the OCR searchable complete Nibble magazine library on DVD.  Recently I purchased a few nibble books on DVD.  I chose a few that I felt would have the most strategic and tactical value to me and it came to a reasonable price.  These books are well written, and quite an asset as I experiment with ideas.  Continuing with my AppleII Attention Deficit Disorder, I was going through some Apple II programming documents about different means of sorting values that I found in the Asimov FTP site AppleII Documents folder.  All of these bits of information went into my Apple II mixing plenum, and got processed by my subconscious.

Tuesday, I had difficulty sleeping.  I turned to a new technique for me: counting in binary.  It’s how I did it that was strange.  I let the for fingers on my hand represent switches and I incremented the bits as I counted:  No fingers, Pinky, Ring, Pinky/Ring, Middle, Middle/Pinky, Middle/Ring, Middle/Pinky/Ring, Index, Index/Pinky, etc., etc.

I think that this method has a name and really was just a binary version of “Chisholm bop”.

Eventually I picked up on the rhythm, steady and trance inducing.  The rhythm slyly made it’s way into my cerebral cortex, seductively tempting my brain with something that was just out of reach.  I couldn’t see what it was.  And then the seventh veil dropped.

I have never been really fluent with Hex to Binary conversion but now I have a new tool that is going to help me.  It’s a conversion table my brain saw.  Just make a 4×4 table of hex counting $0 to $3 left to right and continuing to $F.  Now count to 4 in binary on a header row and column.

___00   01   10   11
00    0    1    2    3
01    4    5    6    7
10    8    9    A    B
11    C    D    E    F

Find the hex number of interest and read the left column and top row.  For example: B is equivalent to left column 10 and top row 11.  1011.  It’s too simple not to have been written about somewhere else, I am sure, but it’s sure was cool actually seeing it in my mind as something new.  Now, when I am teaching people about addressing ADIO’s I can give them a tool than will help them when they need to set the switch to address $2D.

Category: Apple II Notes, People  Leave a Comment
03
Feb
2012

Origins

By

I was thinking about my initial Apple II environment.  Until our family was able to purchase an Apple II, my childhood command center was located in my Uncle’s house.  I was thinking about the desk, a beige sheet metal office desk, with a laminated wood desktop.  The Apple II sat in the center of the desk, under the green screen monitor, on top of a finely appointed, do it yourself monitor stand.  The memories over the years have blended some of the defining qualities of the space.  The monophonic cassette recorder and the disk ][ drives always were to the right of the monitor.  I imagine this is more a result from being right-handed than any positional practicality, but that may be wrong:  A disk drive placed on the left impedes access to the power switch.  A smoke colored plastic disk box sat further to the right of the disk drives and contained frequently used games, and utilities.  There was always felt tip pens and the equivalent of a pilot razor point pens, and mechanical pencils all in a coffee cup.  Early on, to the left of this set up was a teletype, on a stand that functioned as the printer.  It was awesome, loud, and slow, and occasionally functioned as an actual teletype for my uncle’s amateur radio trials.

File cabinets stood across the deep, dark green, pile carpet, that acted as a medium to hold in perfect equilibrium, the scent of the room;  a damp, cold, mixture of in-window air conditioner, cigarette smoke, and whiskey, a combination that you can sometimes smell in small well-established taverns in military towns.  In those file cabinets, resided a pledge I believed in.  They contained manuals (both purchased and Xeroxed), and large 3-ring binders holding sleeve after glorious sleeve of 5.25″ archived diskettes, meticulously cataloged and annotated on printed dot-matrix indexes for each disk.  In addition the beginning of each volume cataloged the disk title.  The information was incalculable to my young mind, and in my years on their machine, I never did explore all of the offerings contained therein.  But that was all right, because I knew it would always be there.  Forever.  Because when you are young, that is the way the world is.

There was a large window that faced out to the back yard.  The window was appointed with black, heavy,  light blocker curtains and were perpetually closed.  When pulled aside, the window would reveal the triangular aluminum framework and guy wires of my uncle’s gigantic radio tower, and beyond the chain link fence, that at this time looked more like a prison dead line, was the abandoned remains of streets, sidewalks and home properties that the Cleveland Hopkins Airport had bought for their own sprawling expansion.  Through the desolate, scarred landscape, and through the sparse treeline, in the distance Brookpark Road marked the original boundary of the airport, and just beyond that one could make out the exotic red and blue lights marking the runway indicators.  The airport tower, a lone sentinel on the horizon, stood a silent witness to my youth, reserving the judgement of it’s ever present and baleful green/white rotating eye.  That black curtain was all the maintained the boundary between the reality of our existence, and the rich 8-bit life that we found inside.

Summer afternoons at my uncle’s house were great, as the endless day allowed complete submersion in whatever activity was primary for my visit, weather it be for extended gaming sessions (I was drawn early on to RPG like DRAGON’S EYE,  and the many titles of RPG and Text Adventure), Applesoft BASIC programming sessions, trying out  1 & 2 liners or a weird Beagle Bros. snippet of code, or an extended pirate session to fill my floppies with purloined goodies, 10 disks at a time.  The teletype would print theses amazingly Pepto Bismol pink labels for these disks, banging out letter after hammered letter, and advancing the pin feed for the next line.

Some weekends I could sleep over.  And occasionally meet other friends of my Uncle.  There was Leo from Washington DC, I think, that played guitar, and would program with my uncle and trade software.  Sometime there would be folks from my uncles work that would visit, and bring something interesting like a remote control helicopter and demo it in the backyard.  We would watch, talk, ask questions.  I remember my uncle say the helicopter was unstable to control, like constantly trying to balance an egg on it’s end.  I watched knowing I would not get a chance to fly what must have been an incredibly expensive model at the time.  An aircraft would approach the airport, unbelievably low to me in my mind as I look back on it, and if we were talking would eventually yell until the speaker realized it was futile.  We would wait for the airplane to pass and continue our conversation.

I remember that my uncle had paddles for the Apple II, with small hard red buttons, that left indentations in small fingers after greedy games playing.  Eventually he built his own joystick.  I thought it was awesome and he built me one.  To this day I think the design is one of the best, but I am not an impartial judge as I used the old one when he acquired a new Apple manufactured joystick.

I moved away in 1989.  My uncle eventually bought a IBM PC.  The airport bought his house and destroyed it. Luckily, he moved away before that last bit.  In the end, he had developed lung cancer, eventually stopped taking phone calls and died while I was in service.  For me, there’s no telling what became of those sheet metal file cabinets that represented the knowledge my young self once had in the ways of the world.

Category: Nostalgia  Leave a Comment
31
Jan
2012

Welcome to the Machine

By

One of the aspects that I like about my abstract and amorphous endeavors on the Apple II platform is the opportunity to research topics and get a better understanding about the machine.  To those ends I have been heavily  investigating Assembly Language on the Apple II platform, a topic I had dabbled in long ago.  Now, I wanted to take an honest look at what it was going to take to code a program idea that I have.  I want to fully describe the program, a program of such ridiculousness, that it’s only purpose would be to teach one how to code assembly.  I won’t give details though, because I want to see if I can do it, no matter how long the project may take, and I want to see how much of details I can solve on my own.

So I have been looking at where to start.  I reviewed Applesoft.  I must admit that I have not been using this language at all.  I pulled a physical high-school text book on Applesoft from my library .  This was my textbook and I have to admit I didn’t open it often.  By the time the system had made me enroll in an actual Applesoft class, I was well versed.  Cracking it open this time though I had a surprise for myself:  4 pages of notes regarding a incredibly convoluted RPG character generation program for a RPG game I was inventing on my own.  Among the randomly generated characteristics, six of the archetypes included, I also included astrological signs, stats for Lust, Greed, Selfishness, Leadership, Faith, Piety, Mana and a way of setting a social class of Nobility, Warrior, Landowner, Clergy, Freeman, Unfree, and Slaves.  This game, if I remember correctly, would have been very historically based.  It was very interesting for me.  All this, and I had yet to hear of a Renaissance Festival, the SCA, or even Medieval Times.  I will post the notes soon as I get some time to scan them.

After reviewing my time travelling notes, I reviewed some Applesoft and decided that that would be enough and I didn’t think I needed a six week immersion of program writing to get me back in the swing of things.  Although I might revisit this, because I really like the concept of Structured Applesoft and had begun along those ideals but did not make enough progress to speak of.  Everything looked familiar to me, although I am sure that glossing over it like that I am giving myself much more credit than would be evident of someone were to issue me a spontaneous Applesoft Challenge.  So, I moved on to looking at setting up a hard drive image that was strictly for assembly.  I chose Merlin as my editor, mostly because I had used it in the past and I admire Glen Bredon’s software prowess and sensibilities.

I spent a good amount of time reviewing the Merlin manual and entering the sample entries, and getting a feel for the open apple functional commands, that I had to look up because I was looking at an old revision.  Er- Older revision.  I took my time, and it seemed logical enough.

The next place I investigated was the book Assembly Lines by Robert Wagner.  This is a excellently written book, recommended to me, via a textfile on a floppy disk from my youth by none other than Krakowicz himself.  I began reading this book and taking notes.

After some time, I took a break and started looking around for other assembly books that might augment the experience.  I eventually ended up at Nibble.  Some few years ago I purchased the entire Nibble Magazine back catalog in OCR searchable pdf.  The collections came on 2 DVD, sent by the mighty Mike Harvey.  I have to say that this is a treasured possession of mine when I have to research some information.  These 12 years of documentation set a place in time for events in the Apple II continuum.  Prices.  New offerings and and ideas.  And as a former reader, it acts as a framework on which I can hand my memories.

I searched through he books section and selected a few choice editions including The Beginners Guide to Assembly.  I ordered them late Friday evening.  By Monday afternoon the DVD was in my mailbox.  I wrote Mike and thanked him.  He wrote back.  All around great experience!

I am somewhere in my beginning phases of learning this language and trying to be conscience of concepts I can use to give form to my ideas.  This week is a full schedule for me and I am not getting as much time as I want with the books.  I think I get a little reprieve  tomorrow night and maybe I can make serious in roads in my self-learning.

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25
Jan
2012

Apple II. Capital G. Capital S.

By

I am going to try and do justice to this entry, and I am hoping to write it in one shot, and publish it, but I am mentally spent today.  I instructed a class today, and somewhere in the presenting/expounding/redirecting/clarifying/guiding the mental energy gets drained.  It was nice today, though, as a learner turned to conversation towards Apple II’s, a topic in which I am well versed.  We talked for a good while, steering through the Apple II product lines, the chain of CEO’s, I tested my view on the new Scully paradigm, and was met with the same disbelief I once held.  All in all a memorable moment in a long day.  I don’t know how that happens, but it seems to happen a lot with me.  Since I have been a technical instructor, I have influenced and been influenced by a principal scientist who taught me about the Beeb Micro, and I think I sparked an interest for him to build a Zed 80.  In one class I was instructing, I met a man who build his own 6502 computer on board a Navy ship in the 70′s out of a electronics kit they had on-board.  We talked for some time about the way to account for bits in bygone eras, specifically Apple II’s and his experience programming games on them.  I was impressed and happy to meet such Hi-Res person.  I recommended that the engineering department pick him up, because there was more there than met the eye.  It turns out that I had just encountered the man with a heart of dice, the last man standing at Avalon Hill Games, Bill Levay.  It seems that in every class I meet someone that has an eye towards the past, I little air of nostalgia about them, and it makes me like what I do that much more.

Coming home, I got a bio-chemical boost when I saw a rather large box awaiting me with a small box on the top.  Excellent.  I opened the boxes to discover 2 things that changed my experience wiht the Apple IIgs.  THe first was a RGB monitor I picked up.  Holy . . . The clarity of this screen is the best possible, and makes the graphics sing.  It was completely worth the $25 + shipping.  If you have a IIgs, lose the zero and get with the hero, drop that composite cable and get yourself a RGB monitor.

Uthernet, ComputerEyes, TDX, CF MicroDrive, 4MB Ram

The second package was sent to me from England and contained Andrew Webber’s TDX  card.  It is a stereo card the the Apple IIgs.  The Apple IIgs is not able to provide stereo sound out of the box.  Let me tall you a little about it.  This wonderful card separates the GS sound channels into a left and right output for a stereo effect.  The card connects to a 8-pin jack on the motherboard, where it picks up the channels of sound. It sends the sound out via a 1/8″ stereo jack, from which I connected a 1/8″jack to RCA connectors to my Lepai Amplifier to a pair of surround sound speakers I no longer use. This is the sound that should have been emitted from this computer.  It was wonderful!  The transaction with Drew as absolutely wonderful, as he kept me informed of the happening with the card, and when he shipped.  The turn around was absolutely top-notch and overall it was one of the better experiences an online consumer can have.   I unequivocally recommend Drew’s TDX card highly and over the next week or so, as I work my RGB monitor into the desktop, I will find some time to provide some audio samples.

This is what happens when you put a 10 MegaPixels of picture into a 16 bit sack.

Category: Apple II Notes  One Comment
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