Frank Kunze, the man behind the upcoming Eamon Deluxe 5.0, sent out the first beta to play testers early this morning.  Hopefully, this means a general release isn’t too far off.

You can check out Frank’s progress at the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online blog.

Kevin Dady hacked together a joypad for his Apple //c by scavenging an XBox controller and other parts. It’s featured on Hack A Day with instructions on how you can build your own.

Gene Buckle reported today that the Apple IIe that hosted the Age of Reason BBS was the victim of power surges resulting from recent heavy snow in his area of western Washington.  Gene is hopeful that he can have the board back up shortly, assuming the Focus IDE controller survived.

This morning, a PDF scan of a book containing the schematics of the Apple II clones (and other computers) produced by Brazilian company CCE was made available via bittorrent.  The MC-4000 and MC-4000 //e – clones of the Apple II Plus and IIe, respectively – are covered, as well as the MV-12, a composite monitor CCE sold with their Apple clones.  CCE also made a computer called the MC-1000, which was not a clone of any US produced computer, but which used a BASIC that appears to be designed to closely resemble Applesoft.

The final two pages of the PDF give background on the origin of the scans, and the Portuguese version of Wikipedia has some information for the MC-1000, MC-4000 and MC-4000 //e.  None of this is in English, but Google’s translator does a decent job.   1000bit also has pages for some of the CCE clones.

If you have a bittorrent client, you can download the 287 MB PDF here.

UPDATE:  If you’d prefer to avoid the p2p route, you can get the file directly from my Dropbox at this link.

Gerard Putter today posted v6.4.1 of the popular and awesome Virtual ][ emulator for Mac OS X.  Coming on the heels of the recent major update which among other things, dropped support for Mac OS X 10.4 and PPC Macs, this update is designed to address a couple of minor bugs found in 6.4:

Double-clicking a disk in the Finder didn't work anymore when Virtual ][ did not run - this has been fixed.

All pictures in the Inspector Help were missing - this has been corrected.

Get the latest version from the Virtual ][ page.

Taking advantage of Apple’s recent release of the iBooks Author app in conjunction with iBooks 2 and its new textbook intiative, Lim Thye Chean has uploaded an early draft of a new book he’s writing on Apple IIGS Programming for kids to his Dropbox.  If you have an iPad or iPad 2 with the new iBooks 2 app installed, you can check it out here.

David Greelish, who last month made tech news headlines for his in-depth interview with John Sculley and his troubled relationship with Steve Jobs during their days together at Apple, has posted an audio interview he conducted with Bob Cook.  Cook, owner of an early Apple dealership, established Sun Remarketing in 1985 and grew it into a successful direct marketing enterprise, eventually selling over $100 million in used Apple II, III, Lisa and Macintosh equipment before selling the company in 2006.  The Sun Remarketing name will no doubt be familiar to Apple II users as a reliable source of quality, affordable hardware long after Apple Computer, Inc. discontinued their favorite machines.

Among other stories, Bob relates his experiences with getting the business off the ground by selling 3,500 Apple III’s that were formerly used by Apple employees, before Jobs ordered them replaced by Macintosh’s (the III’s, not the employees), as well as having to watch the more than 2,700 Lisa computers in his inventory taken from his warehouse by Apple and buried in the legendary Utah landfill.

You can listen to the interview, which clocks in at just over 45 minutes, here.

Brendan Robert has released an update to JACE, a Java-based Apple II emulator.  Here’s a list of the latest changes, per his comp.sys.apple2 post:

Changes since last build:
-Better NTSC color emulation
-Fixes to prevent crashes on start (race condition in video initalization)
-Tweaks to sound timing
-Experimental raw sound output (activate/deactivate with F7)
-Help text on start screen now reports correct key shortcuts
-Lots of other things here and there I’ve forgotten about (it’s been a while!)
-Removed some configuration options that were causing unnecessary grief (Program counter shouldn’t be a config variable)

Get yourself a copy at this Sourceforge page.

Ivan Drucker presented an informative session on A2SERVER and Apple II networking during KansasFest 2011. Now Ivan has released his work for everyone else to enjoy.

Based on open-source software (Linux, Netatalk and VirtualBox), A2SERVER functions as a preconfigured virtualized AppleTalk server for your vintage enhanced Apple //e (with Apple Workstation Card), Apple IIGS and Macintosh computers. All you need is a fairly recent Macintosh or a PC running Windows, Linux or Solaris capable of running Oracle’s VirtualBox software and some sort of Ethernet/Localtalk bridge.

Get the details and downloads at: Ivan Drucker’s A2SERVER site.

Egan Ford’s disk server projects have both reached their final release versions.  According to Ford’s post in comp.sys.apple2:

I think I can call both projects done for now.  The source has been updated and released (links in the READMEs).

Thanks for all the testing and feedback.  I think both services are fairly solid now.  All that is left to do is to populate the disk server with lots of disks.

If you stumble across a bug or issue, please let me know.

Visit the Game Server here, and the Disk Server here.