(With apologies to Leo Laporte…) Packing and readying for a move across town has kept me from getting started here as soon as I’d like, but that’s coming to an end so I thought I’d kick things off with a summary of all the Apple II goings-on I could find, in the last week or so:

Software updates! Windows-based emulator AppleWin, and Dennis Molony’s Apple II Disk Browser saw new versions recently released (hat tip to Call APPLE for those items).

Michael Packard has officially announced OidZone for Apple II-family computers.

Thomas Harte’s MIT-licensed emulator Clock Signal now emulates the IIe.

Jeff Ramsey invites you to play his server-based Zork I setup on your Apple II. Just telnet over to zork.retroadventures.net, port 6502 and login with the username zork and password 2018Zork.

Did you get on the waitlist for one of John Morris’s Applesauce devices?

VCF West 2018 happened this weekend. Hackaday has some great coverage.

… and I’m sure plenty more 8-bit Apple IIish goodness happened elsewhere, but that’s all I have time for right now. See you soon!

Update: IIGS developer Ewen Wannop reached out to us and let us know the item mentioning the update work on SNAP was inaccurate. We have removed the paragraph and apologize sincerely to Ewen and our readers for the error.

This month on Open Apple, we sit down with Tony Diaz- KansasFest committee member, and consummate Apple II collector. With KansasFest just days away, we go deep on Tony’s amazing collection of unique prototypes, documents, peripherals, and the stories that go with them. If there’s a person with deeper knowledge of the early history of Apple Hardware, we haven’t met them.

Thanks for your patience in June, everyone! Some technical and logistical difficulties kept us from posting this episode as soon as we would have liked. We hope the show is worth the wait. We dive into lots of new hardware toys, KansasFest-like events around the world, lots of software updates, and one of the best Apple II games ever made.

How many times does Quinn boo Atari this month? What can we learn about Mike’s dark, mysterious past? How many tedious Jobs movie news items can the world produce? Listen and find out!

KansasFest 2015 is just days away. Hope to see you all in Kansas City this week!

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.

Rich Dreher has released a new firmware (3.1) for his popular CFFA3000 card.  This latest update offers, among other things, folder support on FAT volumes, “making it easier to organize a large number of disk image files.”  Per David Schmidt’s post to comp.sys.apple 2, here’s a list of everything you can expect when you flash the new firmware:

== Folders ==

Now allows folders on FAT volumes, making it easier to organize a large number of disk image files. Folder names will appear with a trailing ‘/’. Press <Return> on a folder to navigate into the folder. Press ‘-‘ (or use <Ctrl>X, or <Apple>UpArrow) to move back up to a parent folder.

The firmware will remember the current folder for both the CF and USB media. The path shows up at the top left, above “Items:” to separate the current-folder lines from the contents below. The current folder always resets to the top level when you insert the USB drive or CF card.

You can use folders inside folders, up to 8 levels deep. The item list can only show up to 255 items in a particular folder; if you have more files than that, please break them up into sub-folders.

== Assignments Screens ==

<Crtl>B: Now reboots the slot for which you’re making assignments.

Disk II assignments: Comma and Period rotate among the panes.

SmartPort Assignments: When there are more configured images than the “SmartPort Devices” setting, the extra ones appear at the bottom of the right-hand column, marked with ‘*’, and if you highlight one you’ll see “(Unavailable – SmartPort full)”.

Pressing ‘-‘ in a right-side pane deletes an assignment (like Delete / Control-D).

<Apple>Space in the right-hand column toggles between SmartPort and Disk II assignments.

Apple IIgs only: <Shift>Tab cycles backwards through the panes (like Comma does).

== Menus ==

When a menu item for an adjustable setting it highlighted, ‘<‘ and ‘>’ indicators now show which ways the menu item can be adjusted.

The “Quit” or “Boot” menu item now lets you choose which slot to boot from, using the Left and Right arrows.

Quit: Without Booting
Boot: Slot N
Boot: Slot N (Continue)
Boot: Reboot

In the “Other Settings” menu, replaced “Delay for Menu Key” setting with “Menu at Boot” which may select from “Always”, 0.1s..0.2s….up to 25 seconds.

If you choose “Menu at Boot: Always” and your Apple II finds the CFFA3000 at startup, you’ll be able to press Return to continue booting the CFFA3000, or use the arrow keys to choose another slot.

The menus use some MouseText characters (when running on an Apple IIgs or an Apple //e enhanced). If you don’t want to use MouseText, you can turn on DIP Switch 2.

== Performance ==

The CFFA3000 does read-ahead caching from USB or CF, while the Apple II is busy copying the previous block. This requires CPLD v6. Which version you have may be checked any time by going into the menu and selecting the “About” menu. The CPLD version is displayed near the top of the screen.

Various speed improvements in the 6502 and 65816 firmware including faster coordination with the CFFA3000’s microcontroller, and faster entry for ProDOS and SmartPort calls to the card.

== New DIP Switches ==

DIP Switch 1: Flip on if your Apple II or Apple II+ has a “lowercase chip” to allow the CFFA3000 to display lowercase letters.

DIP Switch 2: Flip on if you don’t want to use MouseText.

DIP Switch 4: Flip on if you are using an Apple III. Since Apple III requires the GS DIP Switch to be on, this lets the CFFA3000 know whether it must use the 6502 firmware or the 65816 firmware.

Note 1: To use the CFFA3000 on an Apple III, you must turn on both the GS DIP Switch 7 and DIP Switch 4.
Note 2: The firmware will optimize for the GS’s 65816 when the GS DIP Switch 7 is on and Switch 4 is off.

== Compatibility ==

The end of the Disk II slot ROM now more closely resembles a real Disk II. This makes at least one version of Karateka work.

If you already have the 3.1b2 firmware loaded, here are the specific changes that come with the final 3.1 firmware:

* Pressing ‘-‘ in a right-side pane deletes an assignment (like Delete / Control-D).
* In addition to the existing “go up” methods, Left arrow now navigates Up to Parent Folder in the source column.
* Changed message to “Unavailable: SmartPort full or bad file.” instead of just “(Unavailable – SmartPort full)”.
* New Blank Image: When choosing the size, show the can-adjust indicators, ‘<‘ / ‘>’ (MouseText when available).

Download the new firmware here.

(HT: David Schmidt)

Mike Willegal announced that he is now selling his SUPERPROTO Apple II prototyping kits and PCBs:

I’m going to open up general sales of SUPERPROTO kits and PCBs.

Price will be $65 for a SUPERPROTO kit.

Bare PCBs (no components) are going to be $35 each.
I’m also offering a bundle deal of 4 bare PCBs (no components) for $125.

Shipping will be a flat $10 to anywhere in the world. When I get busy, I often ship on Monday after packing during the weekend. Because of this, shipping may take up to a week after payment, though usually it’s less.

For detailed ordering information, send an email to: mike@willegal.net.

Rich Dreher updated his project status page yesterday with the following:

The assembly house has just informed me that they have shipped 280 (a little over half of the batch) CFFA3000 boards and Remotes to me. They should be here next week. The remaining 220 boards will follow in a few more weeks. I will be opening up and order page and sending out an email to everyone in a week or two.

This is great news for everyone who missed out on the first batch of cards and for those of us who, having sampled the card the first time around, are hungry for more.

(HT: Sean Fahey)

From Charles Mangin comes news of his latest hardware hack, or in his words, “Frankintosh”.  This is a G4 Mac Mini hidden in an Apple IIc case.  Mangin has a nice blog post where he goes over the steps he took to stitch these two machines together and there’s a great Flickr gallery to accompany his description.

Mangin says, “Everything you see is still fully functional. The original keyboard is rewired and run through an Arduino (Teensy) so it can be used as a USB keyboard for the Mini. I’ve also maintained many of the original ports, and repurposed a couple for updated peripherals.”

Ken Shirriff takes an in-depth look at the history and design of computer power supplies in this well-written piece over at his blog, and takes a moment to question the conventional wisdom held by fans and historians, that Rod Holt’s design for the Apple II power supply revolutionized the industry, a view which was also repeated in Walt Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography.  Whether or not you agree with Shirriff’s conclusions, the post is worth a read for the technical and historical information alone.  Check it out here.

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.