This month on Open Apple, Mike and Ken chat with David Finnigan, proprietor of the Mac GUI Web site and author of the upcoming book, The New Apple II User’s Guide. Our eyes are caught by another new book release, The Best of Creative Computing: Volume 3, as well as the upcoming biopic based on Steve Jobs, in which actors have been cast to play Apple’s two co-founders. Prince of Persia is still big news, with the source code for Jordan Mechner’s classic Apple II game having been salvaged, released, and modified, while classic games like Leisure Suit Larry, Dungeon Master, and even Repton are enjoying literal and spiritual remakes. On eBay, we crack open the case to examine broken Apple III boards and prototype Apple IIGS boards.

Find the show on the Open Apple Web site or in iTunes or the Zune marketplace.

From Daniel’s comp.sys.apple2 post:

I wrote a forth style Apple II cross assembler:

http://krue.net/sixtyfive/

sixtyfive is a forth style assembler. It’s only been tested with gforth, but I’m open to adding support for others if it’s not too much trouble.

sixtyfive supports 6502, 65c02, and 65c816 opcodes.
sixtyfive can output a limited set of OMF files.
sixtyfive can compile resource definitions.
sixtyfive can make ToolBox calls (they’re not all added yet though).
sixtyfive can output ProDOS disk images.

The latest iteration of the Vintage Computer Festival East is taking place this weekend in Wall Township, New Jersey.  At 9:30 am on Saturday, May 5, VCF East 8.0 kicks off a weekend of retro-computing fun at the InfoAge Science Center.  The festivities run through Sunday evening and this year looks to be a great one.  For Apple fans, Daniel Kottke’s Sunday keynote speech will be of special interest, as will Mike Willegal’s “Introduction to Apple II Maintenance” workshop.  To check out the full schedule of events, visit VCF 8.0′s web page. Tickets are $10 for one day, $15 for both days, and FREE for ages 17 and younger. Parking is free.

On the 20th birthday of the French IIGS programming group, Open Apple podcast co-host Ken Gagne sits down with Antoine Vignau and Olivier Zardini to chat about the group’s history, what the Apple II and BBS scenes were like in France in the 1980s, how they acquired the rights and assets to popular licenses and ported them to the Apple II, their open source philosophy, and news from other French developers.

You can listen at the Open Apple Web site, or download the episode from iTunes.

Back in January, Australian Apple II user and blogger Lukazi introduced Project WALTR, a hardware hack designed to create a robot that could be controlled with Logo commands.  This week, he(?) updated us with a progress report and the final product looks really cool!  In Lukazi’s words:

“WALTR is a Parallax Scribbler 2 (S2) robot that takes in direct action or interpreted Logo movement commands via a serial connection and executes them. Although I designed WALTR to be run from an Apple II computer any computer with a serial port and a Logo software package that supports serial communications can be used. WALTR can still be used as a Logo robot even without its pen lifter and Bluetooth enhancements.”

WALTR has come a long way since its introduction in January.  Check out everything WALTR can do at Lukazi’s Apple II Projects blog.

Want a peek at the recently-rescued Prince of Persia source code?  Head on over to Github, where Jordan Mechner has posted it.  Download a copy and peruse at your leisure!  The posting includes the original source, the disk routines, and Br0derbund’s disk protection routines.

Brian Fargo’s Wasteland 2 Kickstarter project closed this morning with a final tally of $2,933,197 pledged from 61,289 backers.  That’s more than triple the original funding goal of $900,000.

The Java-based AppleCommander disk image handling application has been updated to add support for Apple GEOS files.  According to the comp.sys.apple2 post by David Schmidt:

AppleCommander command line support has been added to properly place cc65-produced GEOS files on ProDOS images.  John Matthews has posted the 1.3.5.11 build in the AC download page:
https://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews/applecommander

This pico-release adds the -geos argument.  Given a GEOS file in Oliver’s CONVERT format:
http://wiki.cc65.org/doku.php?id=cc65:apple2:geosconvertformat

AC can be invoked like so to place that file on a disk image:

java ac.jar -geos disk.po < file.cvt

Since the CONVERT format includes a filename and other ProDOS atributes as part of the specification, there’s no need to add anything more on the command line.  If you like to do things by hand, though, you can achieve the same result this way:

java ac.jar -p disk.po foo GEO < file.cvt

Again, since the CONVERT spec includes all of the ProDOS attributes, the filename (foo) and filetype (GEO/0×82) are actually overwritten and/or ignored as part of the process.  But the presence of GEO as filetype is the thing that triggers the special GEOS handling.

According to this tweet from Jordan Mechner, the Prince of Persia source code has been successfully recovered!

CNET’s Rafe Needleman celebrates the 35th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II with a few anecdotes from his days as a high schooler selling computers as a summer job at the local Computer Connection store.  Discussed are Dan Bricklin’s killer app, VisiCalc; Todd Rundgren’s Utopia Graphics Tablet System; and a Corvus 10 Meg hard disk system that literally flamed out in spectacular fashion.