Bill Martens of Call-A.P.P.L.E. announced the immediate availability of Digisoft’s Golden Grail CD, an updated collection of Apple II software originating from the Golden Orchard project.

Bill’s announcement (sans version and production notes) follows:

DigiSoft Innovations Releases Golden Grail 1.0

The latest Apple IIgs version of the popular Golden Orchard Series CD’s has been released.

12 December 2009 — Tokyo Japan — Digisoft Innovations is proud to announce the immediate availability of the Golden Grail CD for the Apple II gs and Apple IIgs Emulators.

Golden Grail 1.0 is the result of our effort to make a modern age compilation of the best old Apple IIGS software. Golden Grail originates from the Golden Orchard project of the 1990’s. Golden Grail finally brings Golden Orchard into the modern age by providing the original contents of Golden Orchard in a series of hard drive images that can be used by all modern Apple IIGS emulators. This project has been many years in the making, and much like the original Golden Orchard, turned out to be more complicated and time consuming than originally anticipated.

Let’s face it, nowadays most people probably only run Apple IIGS software in emulators, not in actual Apple IIGS systems. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to use the original Golden Orchard with emulators, due to its complicated multiple HFS partition structure. What’s really needed is a version of Golden Orchard split into convenient 2MG disk images, and now, after many hours of additional work, this is finally possible!

The original Golden Orchard partitions were HFS (except for a single ProDOS boot partition) and larger than 32MB in size. As such, when converting them to ProDOS 2MG partitions, we needed to break up the original partitions into a new structure. The details of this new structure are below. We have written what original partitions map to what new partitions in the list below.

There are two versions of the original Golden Orchard: one with 6 HFS partitions, and a second version with one giant HFS partition. The differences are negligible besides the partition structure. This work is however based on the original Golden Orchard.

We recommend Eric Shephard’s Sweet 16 Emulator for Mac users and KEGS for everyone else for running Apple IIGS programs in an emulated environment. CFFA Users should be able to copy the partitions directly to the CFFA card using Andy McFadden’s Ciderpress utility.

The package is freely available for download from the Digisoft Innvations website as a 228MB zip compressed file which is platform independent.

Website
http://digisoft.callapple.org