Lord British’s return to Britannia is old news – Richard Garriott’s Kickstarter to fund his new game, Shroud of the Avatar, is already up to more than 75% of its stated goal of $1 million – but did you know that pledging at the “Lord of the Manor” level, a $10,000 donation, would have secured for yourself a copy of Garriott’s original game, Akalabeth?

What differentiates this perk from the high-priced copies that occasionally show up on eBay, is that these have been assembled from Garriott’s private stash of left-over parts from when he was originally selling ziploc-bagged copies at his local software store.  Unfortunately, all 10 backer spots at that level have sold already (the Kickstarter launched just three days ago) so if you missed out, you’ll just have to dream about what might have been.

You can read all details at this Wired article.  Is a hand-assembled copy of the original Ultima game worth $10,000?  It was to a few eager fans.

On Friday, David Schmenk posted a video of a neat hardware hack: a Connectix parallel Quickcam running real-time images to his IIe through an Apple Parallel Card.  Today, he showed off the natural evolution of his hack: the Quickcam transmitting in glorious monochromatic high resolution.  According to Schmenk, it’s slow – about 1 frame per second – but it works!

Be sure to visit the Apple II Enthusiasts Group on Facebook to follow David’s progress.

An extensive article detailing the illegal opcodes present in the original MOS 6502 has been posted over at pagetable.com.  Check it out here.

Note: this article is rather old (2008) (age being a relative thing on the interwebs), and as the author states, much has been written to document the opcodes already.  The difference here is this:

I am not aware of any article that tries to explain where exactly they come from. I’ll do this here.

Pagetable.com is an excellent resource for learning assembly language, or brushing up your skills if you’re already an expert.

A new contest has been announced over at the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild.

If you’ve read through the old NEUC and EAG newsletters, you’ve undoubtedly run across one of the contests held years ago. (This is why there are about a billion Eamons mentioning a “Life Orb.”) They tended to produce some pretty solid adventures. Of course, actually sitting down to write an Eamon is a pretty daunting task. While it’s certainly a lot of fun, to write an entire adventure requires some investment of time. So here’s the compromise:

Consider a large Eamon dungeon in the shape of a tower. The challenge is to write in approximately ten rooms a miniature dungeon making up one floor of the tower using either Apple II Eamon or Eamon Deluxe. You can add monsters, treasures, secret doors, and weapons… whatever your mind can generate, so be it. Frank and I will string them together into a (dis)continuous whole and judge on the basis of pure awesomeness.

The winner will receive a plaque on the glorious Wall of Fame (in Frank Black’s Waiting Room micro-adventure) to be memorialized for all eternity. (We’ll throw in a free subscription to the newsletter as well.)

Go here for all the details and contest rules.

Paris, March 3rd, 2013 – Brutal Deluxe Software is proud to announce Mr Sprite, a command-line tool to manage sprites and to simplify the integration of sprites into Apple IIgs games.

Discover Mr Sprite at http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/crossdevtools/mrsprite/

Mr Sprite is part of the Brutal Deluxe’s Cross Developpement Tools Project, a full set of utilities available on Windows (and other) platforms to enable the creation of new Apple IIgs software : 65c816 Assembler, 65c816 Disassembler, 65c816 Simulator, Graphic File Converter, Resource Catcher…

Antoine Vignau & Olivier Zardini
Brutal Deluxe Software
http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/

BD has also posted “Mr. Sprite Tech“, an in-depth look at the technical magic behind the program.