Thanks to Stephane Briancourt, we can see pictures from France’s premier Apple II retro-computing event. Check out the gallery here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/130765014@N06/sets/72157669232460520/

Quinn Dunki embarks on a quest to correct a great injustice; fix the oddball, non-standard system beep of the Apple IIc Plus.

4am is a well-known and gifted software cracker best known for releasing detailed step-by-step instructions for cracking commercial copy-protected programs for the Apple II series, and for also producing ‘clean’ cracks, which is to say the so-called ‘warez’ were free of any vanity crack screens (where the cracker usually takes credit for their exploits).

The Internet Archive (through the efforts of digital preservationist Jason Scott) are now hosting of over 300+ of 4am’s cracks online. You can download the disk image for transfer to your Apple II, or in many cases play the disk image online through your web browser. Many of these cracks are for titles that never got much love from the pirating community, primarily educational titles.

Read more about it at http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4630, as well as see 4am’s impressive array of cracked software at https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am.

Mike Willegal is one of the most knowledgeable hardware hackers in the community. So when Mike shares his accumulated wisdom, it’s probably something you’ll want to snag for your own reference library. Check out Mike’s ‘Apple II Repair Tips‘ page and also his recent VCF presentations in PDF format.

General Troubleshooting
Apple II Maintenance

Good stuff!

Announced by Chris Torrence via Usenet Comp.Sys.Apple2

Assembly Lines: The Complete Book is now available! The book contains all 33 of Roger Wagner’s articles from Softalk magazine, as well as appendices on the 6502 instruction set, zero-page memory usage, and a beginner’s guide to using the Merlin Assembler. The book is currently available for 40% off on Lulu.com, and will be available at Amazon in a few weeks. Note: Roger Wagner has released the book under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and I’m currently working on the eBook version.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/roger-wagner/assembly-lines-the-complete-book/hardcover/product-21959093.html

FYI, I uploaded disk images of the Assembly Lines programs to the Asimov website:

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net//pub/apple_II/images/programming/assembler/AssemblyLinesWagnerDOS1.DSK
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net//pub/apple_II/images/programming/assembler/AssemblyLinesWagnerDOS2.DSK
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net//pub/apple_II/images/programming/assembler/AssemblyLinesWagnerProDOS1.DSK
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net//pub/apple_II/images/programming/assembler/AssemblyLinesWagnerProDOS2.DSK

There are DOS and ProDOS versions. Disk1 contains the programs from chapters 1-17, while Disk2 contains the remaining chapters. Note that a few of the programs (in the DOS chapter) will only work in DOS, not ProDOS.

You can download a copy of the Merlin assembler for DOS at:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net//pub/apple_II/images/programming/assembler/merlin/Merlin-8 v2.48 (DOS 3.3).dsk

And for ProDOS:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net//pub/apple_II/images/programming/assembler/merlin/Merlin-8 v2.58 (ProDOS) Disk 1-2.dsk

Brief Table of Contents:

Preface
Introduction
1. Apple’s Architecture
2. The Monitor
3. Assemblers
4. Loops and Counters
5. Loops, Branches, COUT, and Paddles
6. I/O Using Monitor and Keyboards
7. Addressing Modes
8. Sound Generation
9. The Stack
10. Addition and Subtraction
11. DOS and Disk Access
12. Shift Operators and Logical Operators
13. I/O Routines
14. Reading and Writing Files on Disk
15. Special Programming Techniques
16. Passing Data from Applesoft BASIC
17. More Applesoft Data Passing
18. Applesoft Hi-Res Graphics
19. Calling Hi-Res Graphics Routines
20. Structure of the Hi-Res Display Screen
21. Hi-Res Plotting in Assembly
22. Even Better Hi-Res Plotting
23. Hi-Res Graphics SCRN Function
24. The Collision Counter, DRAW, XDRAW
25. Explosions and Special Effects
26. Passing Floating-Point Data
27. Floating-Point Math Routines
28. The BCD, or Binary Coded Decimal
29. Intercepting Output
30. Intercepting Input
31. Hi-Res Character Generator
32. Hi-Res Character Editor
33. The 65C02
Appendix A: Contest
Appendix B: Assembly Commands
Appendix C: 6502 Instruction Set
Appendix D: Monitor Subroutines
Appendix E: ASCII and Screen Charts
Appendix F: Zero-Page Memory Usage
Appendix G: Beginner’s Guide to Merlin
List of Programs
Directory Listing for Program Disks
Index
Quick Reference