Vince Briel of Briel Computers has announced that he’s taking pre-orders for his new 3-slot expansion interface board for Apple I and Replica 1 computers. The expansion board is connected to the Replica 1 via a standard 40 pin IDE cable, making it possible to add the Apple Cassette Interface, and exciting new devices such as Rich Dreher’s CFFA1 card (currently in testing). Kits will be $44.95 and assembled boards $54.95 USD, plus shipping.

In related news, Vince has developed a PS/2 encoder board for the Apple II and II Plus, to replace failed keyboard encoder boards. He’s also working on an adapter board that convert a standard Apple //e keyboard into an ASCII keyboard so that people who need ASCII don’t have to scrap a II Plus to get one. If either of these projects interest you, be sure to let Vince know.

Mystery House Taken Over is an open-source interactive fiction game. It is based on Mystery House, the first text-and-graphics adventure game, which was originally published for the Apple II in 1980 by what would become Sierra On-Line. The classic Mystery House and other original variations can be played online or downloaded in z-code, which can run on an Apple II with the appropriate interpreter software, such as FrotzGS.

Syndicomm is in the process of moving its online store to a new software package that should help clear up some of the strange problems it’s been having. It’s currently offline, but will return shortly. It may take a couple of weeks after that to finish moving all the products back into the new store.

Terry Olsen has released a Windows chat client that allows for easy access and participation in A2Central’s Apple II chat room. Among its many features are auto-login, customizable fonts and colors, clickable links, ability to save a chat log to file, and more. Visit his web page for more details and to download. Requires .NET framework.

Starting early in 2007, Syndicomm will offer discs containing the contents of the GNO Apple II library. The discs will be sold for around US $5 apiece, and will be periodically updated to reflect the latest contents of the archive. A specific date on which the service will begin has not been determined yet.

After a major reworking of the submissions/vetting interface, the GNO Apple II Archive (formerly the Trenco Archive) is back online. Anonymous download access is available via FTP, and registered users may submit files. Registration is free.

All of the old content has been migrated over to the new service, and new submissions are welcome. In addition, there is also a large backlog of files already on the system and waiting to be vetted and sorted by the editorial staff, including the complete Syndicomm file archive. For more details, please see http://www.gno.org/a2archive

Glenn Jones of A2RetroSystems has announced he’s now taking orders for the third run of his popular Uthernet card and will begin shipping them shortly. At $89 USD, the Uthernet is an affordable way to add ethernet networking to your Apple II Plus, //e or IIGS, plus it’s compatible with Contiki (ProDOS) and Marinetti (GS/OS).

Andy McFadden’s CiderPress is easily one of my favorite must-have shareware utilities. It’s just been updated to v2.4.5 (bug fix) and is a great value at only $9.95. If you use a compact flash drive with your Apple II, you should be using this indespensible program.