Courtesy of Ken Gagne, we now present the KansasFest 2010 Keynote featuring Mark Simonsen of Beagle Bros.

Dr. Steven Weyhrich announced today that the Apple II History site has received a significant site update, and is now running WordPress. The new site features -=new content=- and is online right now. Check it out!

Edit: We’re adding a video of Steven Weyhrich’s announcement courtesy of Ken Gagne.

Tony Diaz of the Apple II Lost Classics Project announced today that Dave Heiden of Legend Industries Ltd. has generously reclassified all of Legend’s products as Freeware. All rights are being retained, and the release is applicable for non-profit, private enjoyment only. CSA2 regular Richard Jackson is credited with obtaining the reclassification and for also providing all of the initial scans of the related material.

A2Central is pleased to announce Tom Weishaar has generously reclassified the copyrights of the entire Open-Apple and Resource Central catalog to the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.

The following titles are covered by the reclassification:

• Open-Apple/A2Central Newsletters
• A2Central On Disk
• Script-Central
• TimeOut-Central
• Stack-Central/Studio City
• 8/16-Central
• Macrocosm
• Fishhead’s Children

The collections will eventually be available from the Apple II Lost Classics Project.

After having missed the first 24 hours or so of this year’s festivities (including what I understand was an excellent keynote speech), I quickly settled in to the late-July routine here at Rockfest: presentations, impromptu hallway brainstorming sessions, and late-night runs to restaurants of dubious quality.

By Friday morning, the effects of sleep deprivation are beginning to settle in on some of the late-night crowd.  The group at breakfast is noticeably smaller and dragging the body out of bed in time for the first sessions a little harder.  We’re at just over the midway point, and things are going well.

Overall, there’s been a much stronger emphasis on 8-bit machines than at some of the recent KansasFests past, and it’s a welcome change.  Not that I don’t enjoy the focus on the IIGS, but it’s nice to know that there are some Apple II’ers keeping the 8-bit spirit alive.  Martin Haye and Ivan Drucker in particular have presented some amazing stuff that doesn’t require a IIGS.

Martin kicked off the day’s session schedule with a continuation of his two-part NakedOS/Super-Mon series, again using only his Apple II Plus not only to demonstrate his extensions to the Apple II’s system monitor, but to run the presentation as well.  Neat!  Super-Mon provides some powerful additions to the monitor that will immediately benefit anyone programming in Assembly or just poking around.

Ken Gage followed this up with the next part in his ongoing series of Classic Gaming Inspirations.  Essentially, Ken gives us a look at some modern games available to users and links them back to their humble beginnings as Apple II titles.  Arkanoid, Dark Castle and Maelstrom are just a few examples of the titles covered.

From here, Ken launched right into the next session, one not originally on the schedule and showing a few of the latest and hottest Internet memes.  If you haven’t seen the hilarious Double Rainbow guy (and the inevitable parodies that followed it – Double Taco Bell, anyone?) or the ongoing Old Spice Guy videos that became so popular Alyssa Milano herself got caught up in them, make sure you head over to YouTube to give them a viewing or three.

Next up was a technical session from Wayne Arthurton covering methods for optimizing algorithms in AppleSoft BASIC.  Wayne decided that he needed better performance from BASIC on his 4MHz Apple IIc Plus and found some neat techniques to make it happen.

Following lunch at the cafeteria at Massman Hall, Stavros gave everyone a demonstration on how to use an Apple II as a dumb terminal for Mac OS X.

Unfortunately, I can’t really say much more about the presentations put on by Wayne or Stavros, as I instead retreated to my room for a bit to catch up on a few personal projects I’d been promising myself to work on when I’m here in Kansas City.  I emerged in time to take in Geoff Weiss’s session on GNO/ME – good, but very technical stuff that was mostly over my head.

My favorite session of the day however was from KansasFest newcomer Melissa Baron, who took the popular Oregon Trail edutainment title and replaced all of the existing in-game text with her own hilarious blend of l337, chatspeak and LOLcats syntax.  After we all got a good laugh from the resulting messages in the game, Melissa surprised us all when she explain her method for replacing the text: she simply opened the Oregon Trail disk image file in TextEdit and replaced the text one character at a time.  Melissa then demonstrated another Apple II technique she calls “glitching”.  This involves replacing a single character in the disk image file – again in TextEdit – with a different character to produce random graphical weirdness on the screen when the image is loaded in an emulator (or, presumably, a real Apple II).  The new and innovative things people come up with to do on the Apple II more than thirty years after its introduction always amazes me and it’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to KansasFest.

Following Melissa’s session, everyone got dressed up for the Dinner Banquet festivities.  Tom Vanderpool of Resource Central joined Dennis Doms as guests of honor and Dennis later chose Tony Diaz’s circuit board tie as the winner of the Annual Roger Wagner Tie Contest.  This year also saw the start of a new annual award given to those members of the Apple II community who go above and beyond in their dedication and contributions to our hobby: the Apple II Forever Award. Inaugural winners were Tom Weishaar, Dennis Doms, Tom Vanderpool and Ellen Rosenberg of Resource Central, as well as this year’s keynote speaker Mark Simonsen of Beagle Bros.  But the best moment of the night was when the award was also given to Juiced.GS’s publisher and KansasFest committee member Ken Gagne.  The look of shock on his face was priceless.

Wrapping up the activities, which were held in the campus pub this year, was a rousing round of live-action interactive fiction, starring Ken Gagne as the computer, and the rest of the KansasFest attendees each taking turns as the player.  Repeated attempts to kiss the princess were met with hilarious results.  Following this, we made our way over near the dorms for the annual photo before being turned loose for an evening of socializing.  A few folks headed to the Apple Store, though I heard later they got there just as it was closing, and a planned game of Apple II Jeopardy to be emceed by Tony Diaz never materialized.

Later on, attendees were rounded up to help unload items from James Littlejohn’s Big Green Bus (yes, it needs to be capitalized) in preparation for the opening of Sean Fahey’s Garage the next morning.  Following that, a large group headed out for a late-night Steak ‘n Shake run.  I considered tagging along, but decided against it – the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak and I spent the rest of the night organizing and posting my photos before turning in.

Thursday was the first full day of sessions, and we were excited to see what the presenters would come up with this year. Peter Neubauer started us off with a presentation on Macrosoft, an Applesoft-like programming language that allows one to achieve machine language speed without having to write assembly code. Peter used Macrosoft to create last year’s winning Hackfest entry. He demonstrated the impressive graphical speed gains achieved over Applesoft. Other nice features are the lack of line numbers (it uses labels), and the ability to interleave assembly and Macrosoft code in the same program. It provides a handy ascii-based status indicator during the compiling process, and you can watch the conversion of your program to assembly in real time. Peter also compiled a short history of Macrosoft after interviewing creator Alan Floeter. Was it used for any commercial software releases? He would love to know if you have any info. Through an arrangement with Mike Harvey’s Nibblesoft, Peter is selling copies of Macrosoft plus the Assembler for $23.95 at the Saturday swap meet. It also comes with a 200 page pdf manual.

The next session by Eric Shepherd was delivered remotely over iChat. Entitled ‘What’s New in iPad Programming”, Sheppy covered the differences between programming for iPad vs. iPhone, such as taking into account multiple screen orientations and screen ratios. To demonstrate, he took his ‘Shepfari’ web browser created during his 2008 iPhone programming session and updated it for the iPad. He took us into the iPhone simulator to show us how to make changes to the graphical user interface. This included turning it into a universal app, and fixing the screen size, location of the address and status bars, and more. Click here to download the Xcode project code.

The last morning session was an engaging panel discussing Apple’s trend towards walling off hardware from the user, thus widening the divide between users and programmers. The Apple II was a very open system, and Apple has increasingly moved away from this from the Mac to the iPhone/iPad. Ken Gagne moderated and kept the discussion moving while panelists Martin Haye, Ivan Drucker and Mike Maginnis gave their thoughts and jousted with each other.

The afternoon sessions kicked off with Martin Haye introducing his new disk operating system, NakedOS. Martin described his goal of writing an original arcade game in 48K, and his need for a DOS with a tiny memory footprint so he can have more room for game levels and other goodies. The 5 1/4” only disk format is standard 6/2 nibble and uses no filenames, only numbers. When not in use essentially all memory is freed up. Compared with DOS 3.3 and ProDOS, reading an entire disk using NakedOS is 45% faster, and write speeds are 30% faster. It uses a scattershot method to read and write to every sector, unlike DOS 3.3 which reads and writes every other sector. Martin is already hard at work on version 1.1. NakedOS is distributed here.

The next session by Tony Diaz looked at the use of baking soda to remove the yellowing that plagues many old computer cases. By controlled sandblasting, he proved that yellowing can be removed without harming the plastic or changing the surface composition of textured plastic. He discussed the benefits of sandblasting versus using a chemical solution such as Retr0bright. Note that you will look like a ghost after sandblasting, with white powder everywhere.

Dagen Brocke’s session on off-platform Apple II development was geared to get everyone’s creative juices flowing. He presented methods to make protoyping in BASIC easier, including using a pseudo BASIC that removes line numbers and replaces them with labels; and writing chunks of BASIC as functions in another language (such as PHP). He created functions to take any GIF image, remap the colors, and spit it out in BASIC–this process can facilitate bringing images into older systems. He also explored HTML5 canvas objects, which lets you draw on the screen similarly to Applesoft.

The final session of the afternoon by Mike Maginnis looked at the much maligned Apple III. The failure of this system as a business computer was also Apple’s first big product failure, and “infinite, incalculable amounts” of money were lost. Mike stripped down an Apple III to the bare case, so we could see the design flaws. The Apple III had many unusual features, such as a diagnostic code-only ROM, a severely limited 48K Apple II emulation mode, and a clock chip that often couldn’t keep time. As a business machine, users bemoaned the lack of an internal hard drive and no high res color monitor. Mike said that users turned to magazines and user groups for help after Apple abandoned the machine. Apple III emulation in this day is sparse, consisting of Sara running on Mac and also built into the Multi Emulator Super System, but apparently not working.

Dinner was in-house and during the evening we were treated to a special one-hour cut of Jason Scott’s new 2-DVD documentary Get Lamp, which is devoted to the story of text adventures and interactive fiction. After the showing, we were taken aback to learn that each KFest attendee was to receive a free copy of the film, to be mailed within two weeks. Jason provided copies at cost and former KFest ‘Grand Gouda’ Steve Godzilla Gozdziewski generously donated the funds to cover those costs. To tide us over until the films arrive, Ken Gagne handed each person a beautiful, numbered, heavy metal coin that is a ‘feelie’ included with each copy of the film (just like the feelies included in the old Infocom games).

The halls were alive until the wee hours with the sounds of clacking Disk II drives, Apple II music, and keyboards tapping as coders worked on their sessions and Hackfest projects. The best part was seeing friends hanging out together in the hallways and rooms sharing their passion.

Tuesday

KansasFest started early for me this year. James Littlejohn drove up Saturday and spent the entire weekend helping me sort and organize my Apple II collection in the sweltering Kansas heat. This is an ongoing project that I sometimes fear will never get done — I’ve simply hoarded collected too much stuff over the years, and some of it is hard to let go of. We rummaged through most of what I had and what I didn’t want to keep was loaded up on Littlejohn’s bus, bound for KFest. At last count, there were several boxes and at least 12 large plastic tubs for attendees to rummage through. I hope someone finds something useful. Next year, there will probably be more as I continue to downsize.

Tuesday arrived and it was finally off to Rockhurst. We arrived around noon, checked in and began unpacking. Although it’s not an “official” KFest day (no sessions), nearly everyone chooses to arrive early to move-in and get settled. It’s great to see old friends, and meet new folks as well. All down the dorm hallway, you can hear the beeps and disk clatter of Apple II computers booting up. I’m pleased to see that a lot of people brought real Apple II computers with them this year — the IIGS and //c are probably the most well represented but there are a few //e computers and at least one II Plus as well. Of course there are a lot of laptops (Macs, PCs), and even an Acorn PPC has been spotted (huh?).

This year, I was tempted to bring my IIGS but instead brought a nicely equipped ROM 04 //c. I wanted to spend part of KFest testing a Mockingboard D that I didn’t know if it worked or not (it does!), a serial to ethernet adapter (not tested yet) and the Guimauve 2000 (works superbly).

Many of the attendees made the trip out to a local restaurant, and afterwards spent the evening roaming up and down the hall, catching up with old friends and checking out each other’s gear and programming projects.

Wednesday

There were a lot of people sleeping in after staying up the night before. Some elected to pass up breakfast and just wait for the KFest Kookout, which again was prepared by chef Kirk Mitchell (thanks Kirk!). During the meal, Tony Diaz performed an impromptu demonstration on how to quickly (and correctly) “pop” open an Apple //c and covered basic troubleshooting and maintenance tips.

The highlight of Wednesday’s activities is the keynote. This year, Mark Simonsen joined us and spoke about his years with Beagle Bros, and how he got involved with computing and the Apple II. Mark’s keynote was easily one of the best I’ve ever seen, right up there with Woz and Jason Scott’s memorable keynotes. Ken Gagne shot the entire keynote, and it should be available online soon. When it is, we’ll post a separate story and link to it.

Later in the afternoon, Rob Walch brought everyone up to date on the latest developments on iPhone 4.0 and the iPad. Rob has his own podcast, Today In iPhone. Check it out.

Juiced.GS brought in massive quantities of Pizza and fed everyone, and that was soon followed by a revived tradition, Bite the Bag. We haven’t seen a BtB competition since our days at Avila so a lot of people were curious to see the ensuing shenanigans. The game is played with participants being able to only have one part of their body on the ground, usually a foot or knee, whilst trying to “bite” and pick up a bag from the floor with only their teeth — no hands allowed. Contestants are eliminated as pieces are torn off the bag, making it lower and harder to bite. The occasional face plant ensues but anyone with the balance, strength and flexibility can win a very nice prize. Ken Gagne won this years contest, defeating the prior reigning BtB champion Geoff Weiss.

Today also marked the beginning of HackFest, the extreme coding event where participants try to code something unique and interesting within the time constraints of the conference. I’m on the judging panel again this year and I’m looking forward to seeing the entries. We have several talented programmers attending this year, so the competition should be impressive.

I sat around watching people play old ColecoVision games on the big screen TV before heading back to the room to work on my projects. It’s going to be another late night of tinkering with the //c with occasional breaks to walk the hall and visit with other attendees.

Thursday’s KFest coverage will be provided by Andy Molloy.

[This is a re-post of a message from the official KansasFest Mailing List sent out by KansasFest attendee and Organizing Committee member Peter Neubauer. It contains the list of prizes announced on the KFest blog.]

The prize collection for KFest is looking pretty impressive thanks to generous vendors and mysterious “anonymous benefactors.” Check out the KFest blog or the copy below for the prizes available and how to win them.

I look forward to seeing all of you soon!
-Peter

Each KansasFest attendee goes home with more than they brought. The memories and friendships made at KansasFest last a lifetime, and the lessons and experiences learned from fellow Apple II enthusiasts, both within and without the structured sessions, lead to even more enjoyment of our favorite platform.

But what about more tangible mementos? How about some fantastic swag?

When you pack for KansasFest, leave room in your luggage, as every person at KansasFest has the opportunity to go home with prizes that will make you a true Apple II power user. Among this year’s selection are hardware, software, and magazines that you won’t find at any other computer convention:

• FC5025 floppy disk controller card (with floppy drive from 16Sector)
• Replica-1 unassembled kit
• Simply Softdisk G-S and Softdisk Supreme CDs (courtesy Syndicomm)
• Focus IDE card
• iPod Shuffle (2GB / black / engraved)
• Assembler/Macrosoft software package (courtesy Nibble Magazine)
• Juiced.GS one-year subscription (courtesy Gamebits)
• 8 Bit Weapon’s Electric High EP CD (courtesy Gamebits)
• $50 cash prize (courtesy Ryan Suenaga)

How does one win such fabulous prizes? There are several ways:

• Enter the HackFest. This programming contest challenges you to create a cool Apple II program in a limited amount of time. Your entry doesn’t need to be practical or even complete to win!
• In honor of Roger Wagner, attendees (men and women!) are invited to “Tie One On” and wear outrageous or ugly ties to the Friday night formal banquet. The person with the best (or worst!) tie will be decided by a member of the planning committee.
• Attendees staying on-site in Rockhurst University dorm rooms may decorate the door to their room. Posters, signs, knick-knacks, and other accessories are all fair play, as long as they can be safely removed at the end of the conference. The best door sign may prove worthy of a prize!
• Show up! Just for being at KansasFest, we guarantee you’ll go home with more than you expected.

Other potential prize venues include playing games such as GShisen or Bite the Bag. These prizes are in addition to whatever gear you haul from Sean’s garage or buy at the vendor fair. Our thanks to all community members and vendors who have contributed to this year’s offerings. So come enjoy the people, activities, and prizes of KansasFest!

Next week, we begin our on-site coverage of KansasFest. I know a lot of our readers wish they could be there in person but couldn’t make it. So, A2Central will try to keep you vicariously involved with daily write-ups and information on new developments. This year, we’ve borrowed Mike Maginnis and Andy Molloy from Juiced.GS to help us cover the event and keep the posts timely (unlike last year). Thanks, guys — I very much appreciate the assistance!

For breaking news and info, you’ll want to follow the KansasFest blog via RSS or email. You can also read Kirk Mitchell’s updates on Twitter and follow the #kfest hashtag on Twitter to get the news as it’s happening. Kirk will also be posting his own daily reports via newsgroup comp.sys.apple2 on Usenet. Don’t have Usenet access? Try Google Groups.

Join the discussion on the official KansasFest mailing list!

We’ll also be chatting on A2Central’s IRC channel at: irc.a2central.com #a2c.chat on port 6667 — join us!

-=THANKS=- to Ken Gagne for his assistance in corralling the links for this post. Check out his Apple II blog, it’s one of our recommended reads.

The A2GS-L01 Project Team has posted an update, including information on features, specifications and recent battery tests. Even better, it looks like they’re still on track to demo the prototype(s) at KansasFest 2010. Personally, I can hardly wait to see it.