April is a good month for the Apple II. KansasFest registration opens. Juiced.GS ships a new issue in beautiful color. Open-Apple ought to release a new podcast soon. Brain Boards ship. Briel’s MP3 player for the Apple II is coming soon. What’s next? How about an NDA, or New Desk Accessory, for GS/OS that counts …
I presented a tutorial introduction at KansasFest 2010 on the Mindcraft Macrosoft programming language, a macro assembler package that allows the programmer to achieve machine language speed with a high-level Applesoft BASIC-like syntax. Macrosoft and its companion Assembler run on you favorite 8-bit Apple II. The presentation was well received, and several people left motivated …
My KansasFest 2010 HackFest entry with source code is now available for your enjoyment. This entry took second place behind Martin’s Wizardy crack. I used Complete Pascal 2.0 with Pegasoft Draw Tools 3.1, both of which are freely available, to create my first 16-bit Apple II program. The program displays pictures from KansasFest and asks related …
There are just so many fabulous things to see and do at KansasFest that Hackfest has not gotten much attention! Where else do you get to see the worst Apple product and a disk operating system almost twice as fast as ProDOS? I want to include full-screen bitmapped images in my entry, and I’m figuring out …
The annual KansasFest HackFest is on! I’ve heard rumors of Wizardy cracking and a Rockhurst text adventure. I’m learning Complete Pascal, learning IIGS toolbox programming, and, just in case I run out of things to do, using those skills to write a graphical Apple II/KFest trivia adventure. I have Complete Pascal running and am ready …
Following the model of Eric Shepherd’s “Some Assembly Required: Hello World” article on A2Central and my last post on the Mindcraft Assembler, I’d like to present the traditional “Hello World” program for 8-bit Apple II using Macrosoft. Macrosoft allows the programmer to achieve machine language speed with a familiar BASIC-like syntax. Technically, Macrosoft is a macro …
Following the model of Eric Shepherd’s “Some Assembly Required: Hello World” article on A2Central, I’d like to present the traditional “Hello World” program for 8-bit Apple II using the Mindcraft Assembler. Slide the Assembler disk into your drive or run the BOOT.SYSTEM program. Press “E” to enter the editor. Press “enter” once to get a “!” …
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The Apple IIgs is a great platform for software development. Compared to 8-bit Apple II machines, the IIgs offers a faster processor, more memory, higher resolution video, and a more modern desktop graphical user interface (GUI). The operating system, GS/OS, offers features found in modern desktop operating systems, such as a relocating system loader, dynamic …
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From KansasFest: KANSAS CITY, MO — December 22, 2009 — Mark Simonsen, employee number three and later owner of Beagle Bros, will be the keynote speaker at KansasFest 2010. At Beagle Bros, whose popular software products for the Apple II hobbyist demonstrated the publisher’s quirky sense of humor, Mark developed software including Flex Type, Beagle BASIC, …
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Conway’s Game of Life is mathematical exploration into artificial life. The game consists of a grid of cells, and each cell is either alive or dead. A simple set of rules relate the cells alive or dead in the current generation to the previous generation. The interesting thing about the Game of Life is that …