(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.

Brendan Robert has released the latest Java Apple Computer Emulator (JACE) build. Here are the changes:

] Fixed nasty bug that caused crashes when joystick buttons (alt-keys) were pressed. Airheart is 100% playable again!

] RamWorks support is now available for up to 8 megabytes of memory. In addition to the RamFactor support it is possible to use both at the same time. Not that you’d ever use 24mb ram in an Apple //e. :-P

] CPU can now log warnings if 65c02 extended opcodes are used. You can enable this to detect old incompatible usages of illegal 6502 opcodes.

] Cleaned up a few improperly implemented softswitches. MMU implementation is 100% compatible now.

Download it here: https://sites.google.com/site/brendanrobert/projects/jace

*Paris, Nov. 19, 2012*

Brutal Deluxe Software releases WindowCapture. It is a utility focused on screen capture. It has been designed to help in Graphic Resources catching (backgrounds, sprites, animations, palettes…) from games running under emulators.

Unlike Windows native Screenshot functionality (PrintScreen key), WindowCapture captures only the content of a window (not the whole screen) and save the results as image files on disk (file name is auto incremented). No need to enter a graphic program anymore to paste and save.

WindowCapture can grab only a small area of the window (remove unwanted borders). Based on the number of colors available in the picture, it will save the image as GIF (256 or less) or BMP (True Colors).

WindowCapture can take One Shot or Record the screen and take pictures on a regular timing (up to 100 pictures / second). This latest feature is useful to get all the sprites used for an character animation.

WindowCapture 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…

WindowCapture is Windows only and can be found at http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/crossdevtools/windowcapture/

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

An announcement has been made over at the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online blog regarding Eamon Adventure #255: Tenement of the Damned:

I’m very happy to announce that Eamon #255 “Tenement of the Damned” has been completed.  Frank Black was able to recover the entirety of the French program and I, in turn, translated it into English using the 6.2 Dungeon Designer Diskette. (“Maudit” is Version 6 and I felt that the English version ought to approximate the French experience as much as possible.) Finally, a menu was put in giving players the option of playing the game in either French or in English.

An official disk image is being prepared and will be made available for download “soon” and a lengthy review is planned for an upcoming issue of the Eamon Deluxe Newsletter.  In the meantime, you can stop by the Guild blog and read all about it.

October 1st, 2012 – Antoine Vignau and Olivier Zardini, founders of Brutal Deluxe Software, are proud to introduce their newest software to the Apple II community.  “I’m fEDD up” is Brutal Deluxe’s second answer to nowadays preservation of 5.25" diskettes on the Apple II. Its main features are:

Essential Data Duplicator compatible

If Utilico Microware’s EDD or compatible card is installed in your system, it will use the card’s powerful features to read track data.

Nibble and timing preservation

It saves raw nibbles and their associated time cycles in separate files.

ProDOS compatible

That may sound weird but that is important. SST is no longer needed ;-) The requirement of two drives is no longer needed.

Get it here!

Frank Black today released Eamon Deluxe 5.0: 

Eamon Deluxe is an enhanced and expanded variation of the classic Eamon gaming system. With the release of version 5.0, Eamon Deluxe features cross-platform portability and an alternate accessibility mode for disabled or vision impaired users. The Eamon Deluxe adventure library includes a growing selection of original adventures as well as ongoing conversions of all known Eamon adventures.

Stop by the revamped website and download a copy for Windows, Mac or Linux, and be sure to check out Frank’s all-new Eamon adventures today.

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.

To quote David:

“If you haven’t seen GSport before, it is a derivative of Kent Dickey’s KEGS Apple IIgs emulator.  Virtual printer support from Chris Mason (now with plain text output!) and Uthernet emulation from Glenn Jones are the big-ticket improvements over that code base, along with other contributions gathered up from several other KEGS offshoots.”

New functionality:
*   Added text-based virtual printer output for all platforms
*   Added OSX drag/drop “installer” disk image (.dmg)
*   Disk images will automatically mount and boot when specified as the last argument on the command line, or when invoked from the Windows shell (file->open as GSport.exe)

Bug fixes:
*   Added sound libraries in Win32 binary, mistakenly omitted

Schmidt elaborates on what’s new:

“Startup on Windows was annoying to me, needing to run a batch file to set up the path.  So all the .DLLs moved to the main directory.  That had some interesting side-effects: it enable the “file->open as” action to start GSport, which in turn led to the notion of automatically mounting and booting any arbitrary image – no matter what it is.  So, 5-1/4″, 3-1/2″, and hard drive images can “just work” when double-clicked (after setting up the default shell behavior).

“Mac OSX now has a drag and drop install – from the DMG, just drag the GSport folder over to the Applications folder.  The binary is fatter now, with (fingers crossed) PPC and Intel binaries that may work all the way back to OSX 10.4.  No guarantees, but 10.5 and 10.6 are working for me on both architectures.”

You can find the new release here.

Kim Howe, author of several popular Apple IIGS applications, wrote in to let us know that all of his titles have been reclassified as freeware.  From his email to a2central.com:

“Just wanted to advise anyone who was interested that my programs have now all be reclassified to freeware. The new versions with updated status and contact details are available at: http://members.optusnet.com.au/appleiigs/index.html.  There are no actual modifications to the function of the programs at this stage.  The programs are: Arachnid – the stand alone GS web browser, TelnetNDA – a Telnet new desk accessory which runs with Marinetti, YahtzeeNDA – a dice game for one to four players, and Shipwrecked – a Hypercard IIGS based adventure game.”

That’s great news for IIGS fans and users of Kim’s products, and we thank him for his generous decision.

Brendan Robert continues to improve JACE, the Java Apple Computer Emulator.   Today, he added Passport MIDI Adapter support and fixed a minor bug.  Per Brendan’s comp.sys.apple2 post:

“I just confirmed that JACE can output music from Ultima V very very very very beautifully.  Note that if you use linux you might be better off using OpenJDK as the Sun JRE drivers SUCK for audio. Passport MIDI is mostly emulated at this point.  I didn’t implement any sort of actual MIDI IN/OUT functionality — just a virtual MIDI Out to the embedded java midi synth engine.”

Get the latest build of JACE here.