HackFest is an annual Apple II programming contest held during KFest. It begins at 7 am on Wednesday and ends Saturday morning. This year we had five talented participants.
Fifth place – Matthew Schock crammed hard to learn C and the result was a program that allowed drawings to display as a movie by using timing between wipes.
Fourth place – Margaret Anderson developed an application to solve substitution cipher puzzles.
Third place – Thomas Compter wrote a Weight Watchers point calculator program.
Second place – Andrew Roughan wrote Share Clip GS (tentative name), an amazing program that allows the clipboard from a IIgs to be shared with a Windows or Mac clipboard over a network. It may be available in the coming months for download. It interfaces with existing versions for Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
First place – Michael Mahon presented his NadaNet ball demo. Michael’s two networked Apple II computers passed a bouncing ball back and forth between each screen, all while maintaining the correct angle and trajectory as the ball crossed from one monitor to the other. Many of us in the audience saw this as the beginning an Apple II network game of Pong!
Prizes were awarded to each participant, and included an Apple IIc Plus and case (donated by James Littlejohn), an APC surge protector, a nice set of computer speakers, a copy of Steve Wozniak’s book iWoz, and a Chop Shop Apple II t-shirt. Many thanks for the prize donations by Howard Katz (over 20 prizes!), Sean Fahey and Ryan Suenaga of A2Unplugged.