At the dawn of 2014, Open Apple, the Apple II community’s only monthly podcast, engages in its annual tradition of reflecting on all that has transpired in the Apple II community in the past year. Ken Gagne moderates a panel of Mike Maginnis, Andy Molloy, Ivan Drucker, and David Schmenk to look at topics in news, emulation, hardware, software, conventions, and publications. Popular themes include the Raspberry Pi, the S-Prize, social media, JSMESS, the Jobs film, and KansasFest 2013.

Find the show at the Open Apple Web site or in the iTunes and Zune podcast directories.

Volume 18, Issue 4 (December 2013) of Juiced.GS, the longest-running Apple II publication in print, has been mailed to all subscribers. This issue features a review of the Replica 1 Ten from Briel Computers; a preview of David Schmenk’s Apple II Pi card; an interview with Jonathan Zufi of the Shrine of Apple and Iconic; and much, much more!

This is Juiced.GS‘s fourth quarterly issue of 2013. Subscriptions are available for both 2013 and 2014 at $19 for United States customers, $24 for readers in Canada and Mexico, and $27 for international customers, with several free sample issues available as PDFs.

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.

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.

David Schmenk today introduced PLASMA.  According to David’s write-up,

“PLASMA is a combination of virtual machine and assembler/compiler matched closely to the 6502 architecture.  It is an attempt to satisfy a few challenges surrounding code size, efficient execution, small runtime and fast just-in-time compilation.  By architecting a unique bytecode that maps nearly one-to-one to the higher level representation, the compiler/assembler can be very simple and execute quickly on the Apple II for a self-hosted environment.  A modular approach provides for incremental development and code reuse.”

The project is still in the early phases of development and Schmenk outlines the direction he intends to take PLASMA:

“The original design concept was to create an efficient, flexible, and expressive environment for building applications directly on the Apple II… The ultimate target is to have a complete IDE available for the Apple II… The next step is to write the PLASMA compiler in PLASMA itself to self-host on the Apple II.  Along with being self-hosted, a more flexible module file format will be created to allow loading modules on demand and putting the bytecode interpreter and module loader in the RAM card memory, thus freeing up much needed main memory.”

To read the complete details and download a disk image containing a demo of David’s work so far, click here.

The August 2011 episode of Open Apple, the only co-hosted Apple II podcast, is now available. This month, Mike and Ken keep the KansasFest vibe going with first-time attendee David Schmenk, getting his perspective on the greatest products, sessions, and experiences of last month’s Apple II convention, from the CFFA3000 to Sweet16 and more. Ewen Wannop’s publication of an online magazine archive leads to a brief discussion on the creation and consumption of PDF scans, after which Tony Diaz gets on the line to clarify a hardware matter. eBay offers a bounty of pins, buttons, and games, before the hosts get ready for a special guest at this month’s Denver Apple Pi user group meeting.

Find the episode on the Open Apple Web site or in iTunes.