I was in a thrift store and saw it. The computer of
my youth. An Apple ][e with a monochome monitor and
a single disk drive. This 64k powerhouse led me through
Junior High and High School with it's superior games.
Atari? Don't make me laugh. Commodore 64? Pathetic.
Apple was the shit, and I was in the bathroom a long
time.But I didn't get it. Why? Well, seventy bucks is expensive, and I still have an old machine in my parents attic. Moreover jimmod@aol.com pointed me to the web/ftp site below:
ftp://ftp.asimov.net/pub/apple_II
http://www.asimov.net/apple_II
The site describes itself as a place that has " Everything you need to turn your $5,000+ IBM PC, Macintosh or high-powered Unix workstation into an Apple][+ in 3 easy steps! " Not only that, but it has disk images of every single game I used to play. Woah!
Now getting it to work on your system might seem like a herculean task, but it isn't. But I wouldn't call it EASY either. The results are really cool though. I can run M.U.L.E., Choplifter, SunDog, Ultima I-V, Mobius, ANYTHING that ran on that old machine! Sure, it's slow and relearning an old operating system is a bitch, but it's anachronistically cool. And cheap. These games cost $40-50 bucks a piece but are now free! (well... they're not exactly freeware but I don't think that anyone is going to get mad)
I downloaded a copy of STM, an Apple][+ emulator for the Mac and got it running on my old 33Mhz 030 Mac no problem. From the program you mount separate disk images which represent the old 300k disks, and simply run them.
To get the disk images to work, you need a program that can uncompress the Gnu Zip or .gz compression scheme. Then you may need to run a program that will enable the emulator to read the .DSK format. For STM I used DSK Autotyper. (available on the asimov.net site or the Ooze Emulator site below)
CONTENTS OF ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/ooze/iie/
Blank.DSK- a blank disk you can use to save games on.
STM 0.88- an Apple ][ emulator for the mac
DSK Autotyper- automatically converts .dsk files for STM use.
Games- Joust, Roadwar 2000, Choplifter in ready to rock format (no GZipping)
I have some other emulators, a Commodore 64 and a Virtual Game Boy that work pretty well, but I liked the Apple the best. Its #1 slot might be usurped by a program that lets you emulate a Timex Sinclair 1k computer. Now that's really stupid.
Boyfriend Survey Embarassing Letters
Back to the Table of Contents
|
The Journal of Substance, Wit,and Dangerous Masturbatory Habits |