BASIC, that simple language that was an integral part of the Apple II experience for so many fans, turns 50 this month and to help celebrate, Woz has contributed a nice little memoir about how he wrote Integer BASIC from scratch.

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.

Still haven’t learned how to program your Apple II in its native language?  Maybe this “tiny ebook” is just what you need to get started.  Author Nick Morgan writes:

In this tiny ebook I’m going to show you how to get started writing 6502 assembly language. The 6502 processor was massive in the seventies and eighties, powering famous computers like the BBC Micro, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Bender in Futurama has a 6502 processor for a brain. Even the Terminator was programmed in 6502.

Check it out over at github now.

Over at comp.sys.apple2, an extensive message detailing the disassembly of Richard Garriott’s Ultima 1 has been posted.  It’s a great read and definitely worth checking out if you’re at all interested in Ultima, game programming or just Apple II programming in general.  Check it out here.

Back in January, Australian Apple II user and blogger Lukazi introduced Project WALTR, a hardware hack designed to create a robot that could be controlled with Logo commands.  This week, he(?) updated us with a progress report and the final product looks really cool!  In Lukazi’s words:

“WALTR is a Parallax Scribbler 2 (S2) robot that takes in direct action or interpreted Logo movement commands via a serial connection and executes them. Although I designed WALTR to be run from an Apple II computer any computer with a serial port and a Logo software package that supports serial communications can be used. WALTR can still be used as a Logo robot even without its pen lifter and Bluetooth enhancements.”

WALTR has come a long way since its introduction in January.  Check out everything WALTR can do at Lukazi’s Apple II Projects blog.

Jason Scott has been hard at work filming his next set of documentaries.  As part of the process, Scott has been posting to his YouTube channel “teaser” clips and “test footage” from some of the interviews he’s been conducting.  Here’s one that might be of particular interest to Apple II users, in which John Romero describes committing the Apple II memory map to memory.

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.

Lim Thye Chean’s IIGS programming book, “Virtual GS” is now available from the iTunes store.  This free iBook was created with Apple’s free iBooks Author app and requires an iPad with iBooks 2 running iOS 5 or later.  Lim’s book covers several popular IIGS programming topics, including Pascal and GSoft BASIC.

Taking advantage of Apple’s recent release of the iBooks Author app in conjunction with iBooks 2 and its new textbook intiative, Lim Thye Chean has uploaded an early draft of a new book he’s writing on Apple IIGS Programming for kids to his Dropbox.  If you have an iPad or iPad 2 with the new iBooks 2 app installed, you can check it out here.

Egan Ford’s Apple Disk Server, which is an off-shoot of his Apple Game Server ONLINE! has been in development for a while now and has reached beta v5.

Apple Disk Server BETA v5

Here’s a list of all the changes since the project first came online earlier this month.

Jan 8, 2012
* Beta v5 released.
* Extra second of padding for slower drives.

Jan 7, 2012
* Beta v4 released.
* New 8KFI option that uses more reliable 8000 bps code.  Try HIFI first, if that does not work use 8KFI.  8kFI works with emulators too.
* All audio files volume decreased from 100% to 75%.
* In-line help.

Jan 6, 2012
* Beta v3 released.
* New INSTA-DISK with less padding.
* FORMAT and NO-FORMAT options. NO-FORMAT assumes preformatted diskette.
* All audio files volume increased from 75% to 100%. I cannot go any higher.

Jan 5, 2012
* Beta v2 released.
* All audio files volume increased from 50% to 75%.

Jan 3, 2012
* Beta released.