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.

This morning, our good friend Bill Martens over at Call-A.P.P.L.E. announced the (re-)release of the GEOS Apple II CD.  Containing a wealth of documentation and software, this download weighs in at a hefty 140 MB.  GEOS is a graphical user interface for 8-bit computers that was originally developed and released by Berkeley SoftWorks for the Commodore 64.  Breadbox Software, current GEOS copyright holder, reclassified the Apple II version, which was originally released in 1986, as freeware thanks to the efforts of Bill and Call-A.P.P.L.E.

Visit the Call-A.P.P.L.E. article to read more about it and download the CD.

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.

As of this morning, A2Central is now being published to Google’s new Currents platform.  Designed as a personalized digital news magazine in the style of Flipboard, Currents lets you access your favorite news sources in a single app that features an attractive and easy to use interface.

To subscribe to A2Central, download and install the free Currents app from the App Store for your iPhone or iPad, or the Market for your Android device.  Open the app, tap "add more" and search for A2Central.  Once you are subscribed you’ll get all the latest Apple II news and views right at your fingertips, right as they’re published!

David Schmidt wrote in to advise us that the source and executables for Dave Lyon’s Davex command shell are now hosted via Sourceforge. Davex is an extensible command-line shell, with several commands for common filesystem tasks (e.g. copying, moving, creating, deleting and so much more) that we all wish were built-in to ProDOS and SOS. David’s announcement is attached:

Dave Lyons’ Davex shell is now available in source and executable form from Sourceforge here:

http://davex.sourceforge.net

The current (preliminary) version is 1.30p, and includes executables on disk images for both ProDOS and SOS computers and emulators. The ProDOS version currently lacks some of the external commands (but you can watch the Sourceforge project for more), and the SOS version is currently a minimal subset of the ProDOS version. One an all are welcome to use and contribute.

It’s great to see the source code for this excellent software available to the Apple II Community. Thank you Dave Lyons and David Schmidt.

This month on the Open Apple podcast, Mike and Ken are joined by Rob Kenyon, a two-time KansasFest attendee as well as a professional programmer and 30-year veteran of the Apple II. We talk about how great it is to be a part of the international community of Apple II users, even if none of us can afford to buy Apple’s founding contract in a Sotheby’s auction. Rob asks, did Steve Jobs purposely kill HyperCard to turn the Mac into a more closed environment? We congratulate Wade Clarke and Andrew Schultz on their showing in the 17th annual Interactive Fiction Competition. Plenty of original Apple II computers are selling on eBay, with Mike and Rob discussing how to distinguish an authentic classic from a modified one. We share our wishes for the holiday season, including for an affordable accelerator card and a CFFA3000, before signing off for the calendar year. Please take our listener survey, and see you in 2012!

The episode can be found at Open-Apple.net or in iTunes.