You may recall from our prior Prince of Persia coverage that Jason Scott and Tony Diaz helped Jordon Mechner resurrect the PoP source code from Mechner’s old disks and upload it to Github. Recently, Jason Scott posted a follow-up on Facebook’s Apple II Enthusiasts group about the efforts of PoP fan Adam Green.

Here’s Jason’s post:

Great news on the Prince of Persia front: Adam Green, a huge fan of the code and the original game, has been spending the time since Tony Diaz and I worked with Jordan Mechner put Prince of Persia on Github. He’s reverse engineered everything, documented it to within an inch of its life, and then created instructions and helper code to allow someone to actually build working images of Prince of Persia that boot in emulators (and possibly an Apple II). It’s a monumental achievement, and what we dreamed someone might have the time and effort to get done. If you scroll down, you can read all the essays he’s written explaining all the ways the code, the disk protection, and the system works. Great stuff.

You can see all Adam’s contributions here.

Remember David Schmenk’s awesome hardware hack where he routed the output of an old parallel Connectix QuickCam to his Apple IIe through an Apple Parallel Card?  Of course you do.  Here’s how he did it, in case you want to build your own: Part I – The Hardware, Part II – The Software.

If you are subscribed to Juiced.GS, you’re one of the lucky people who received not only another issue of great Apple II content, but a 5.25″ floppy disk containing the recently-released Drift demos, as well.  The disks came in hand-made floppy jackets designed by Apple II artist Melissa Barron, and yesterday, she posted to her Tumblr a detailed walkthrough of her creation process.

Still haven’t learned how to program your Apple II in its native language?  Maybe this “tiny ebook” is just what you need to get started.  Author Nick Morgan writes:

In this tiny ebook I’m going to show you how to get started writing 6502 assembly language. The 6502 processor was massive in the seventies and eighties, powering famous computers like the BBC Micro, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Bender in Futurama has a 6502 processor for a brain. Even the Terminator was programmed in 6502.

Check it out over at github now.

Ewen Wannop announced via Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.apple2 that he has created a starter kit for the popular Apple IIgs emulator, ‘Sweet16’. Ewen’s announcement is attached:

Announcing the Sweet16 Starter Kit

Comprising a pre-installed disk image, and a PDF set of instructions, you only need to add a copy of Sweet16, and your favourite IIgs ROM image, and you are ready to go.

The disk image comes with System 6.0.1 installed, as well as Marinetti 3.0.1 installed and working. You are ready to get online from your Mac with a single click.

Included on the disk image are some useful utility programs, as well as working copies of SAM2, SNAP, and SAFE2.

With a simple configuration of SAFE2, you can connect directly into your Mac using FTP, and copy files into and out of the IIgs environment with ease.

Also released today are updates to SAM2 2.0.4, and SNAP 1.1.4.

All these, and more, are available from my website:

http://www.wannop.info/speccie/

Ivan Drucker presented an informative session on A2SERVER and Apple II networking during KansasFest 2011. Now Ivan has released his work for everyone else to enjoy.

Based on open-source software (Linux, Netatalk and VirtualBox), A2SERVER functions as a preconfigured virtualized AppleTalk server for your vintage enhanced Apple //e (with Apple Workstation Card), Apple IIGS and Macintosh computers. All you need is a fairly recent Macintosh or a PC running Windows, Linux or Solaris capable of running Oracle’s VirtualBox software and some sort of Ethernet/Localtalk bridge.

Get the details and downloads at: Ivan Drucker’s A2SERVER site.

Egan Ford (aka datajerk of the jerkwerks) today announced that his web-based Online Apple Game Server is open for business. The concept is that games can be served directly to your Apple II as audio files through the machine’s cassette ports. Ford has posted a video tutorial explaining exactly how to get it up and running. Inspired by the original a2gameserver, Ford’s project has been tested on the iPhone 4, iPad 2, Mac Firefox, Mac Chrome, and Mac Safari. More than 100 titles are available to play now.

CP/M was a popular command line-based operating systems for PCs in the 1980’s, before Microsoft’s MS-DOS took over the platform.  It was also available on the Apple II (and III) thanks to the efforts of third-party vendors such as Applied Engineering and Microsoft, who sold the necessary hardware to interested users.  CP/M never really took off on the Apple II mainly because of the popularity of DOS and ProDOS, the availability of powerful applications that didn’t require the purchase of additional (and often expensive) hardware to run (such as AppleWorks), and because it was seen by loyal Apple fans as an “IBM thing”.

Not everyone eschewed Gary Kildall’s OS though and today, there exists a small but dedicated group of CP/M users in the Apple II community.  Gord Tulloch is one of those users and he recently started the AppleCPM blog.  In his latest post, Gord describes the steps he discovered by trial and error to get CP/M up and running on one of Rich Dreher’s popular CFFA cards.  His instructions utilize Steven Hirsch’s PCPIPRO and ProPartition software and only work with the PCPI AppliCard, and you must follow the steps exactly but I gave this a whirl last night and it worked fine for me.

Currently, the instructions still require you to boot from a floppy disk but Gord promises a future post on how to boot from the CFFA, as well as instructions for getting it working on the new CFFA3000.  If you’re interested in running CP/M on a modern mass storage solution for the Apple II, be sure to check out his blog.  You can also subscribe to the Yahoo AppleCPM group for a great file repository and forums for support from a knowledgeable, friendly group of CP/M fans.