Hackfest Day 2

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 …

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Hackfest Day 1

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 …

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Saying “Hello” with Macrosoft

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 …

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Saying “Hello” with the Mindcraft Assembler

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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Apple IIgs development with MPW – Setup

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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Low-Res Life for the Apple II

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 …

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