This month on Open Apple we sit down with David Schroeder, author of classic Apple II games such as Crisis Mountain, Dino Eggs, and Short Circuit. We talk about the randomness of our passionate brand-loyalty, the logistical realities of early Apple II development, and the magical era of “one-person, one-game”. We get into a lot of the technical details of Crisis Mountain and Dino Eggs, so you might pick up some tips for your own Apple II projects! David also has great memories of the economic and design realities of the time, where everyone was scrambling to figure out what a computer game was, and what players really wanted. Game developers are still fighting that battle, but at least we have a definition of “video game” now.

We’re sharing David’s games in the show notes below, with his permission! In exchange, he asks that you patronize, share and support Dino Eggs: Rebirth.

After that we jam through some quick news, bask in the fallout (see what I did there?) of the GEOS episode, and we get down and dirty with rodents. Do you have the GS with the bigger Em Bees? Trust us, you want the bigger Em Bees.

You might notice that we’re continuing to tighten up the show. Let us know how you feel about this trend in our show length! Do you like the shorter episodes? Miss the epic three hour monsters? Email us at feedback (at) open-apple (dot) net. We have social media too, but we can never remember which ones.

Texas rocker Joe Ely has released B4 84, an album he made with an Apple II, using the alphaSyntauri music system and a Roland 808 drum machine.  In a brief interview with the San Antonio Current, Ely discusses the details of the album, which was recorded over 30 years ago, his interactions with Woz, and how his record company liked the songs but wanted him to re-record them using traditional studio methods.  The redone tracks were released on 1984’s Hi-res album which, “didn’t do very well.”

Now Joe has released the original recordings and you can get your own copy for $9.99 on iTunes, with liner notes by Steve Wozniak himself.

Oh, and hey – did you know Joe ran his own BBS back in they day?

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.

This month on Open Apple, Mike and Ken speak with Martin Haye, 8-bit programmer extraordinare. We love us some conventions, be they KansasFest, the Vintage Computer Festival, @party, ROFLCon, or WordCamp. We wonder why video games have abandoned humor and if Kickstarter can bring it back. Steve Wozniak is advising the Steve Jobs film — no, not the one in which Ashton Kutcher will play Steve Jobs, but that raises the question: who will play the hosts of Open Apple? On eBay, we’re suspicious of an Apple IIe that was supposedly once Jobs’, and we wish there were a more comprehensive online resource for Apple II clones.

Listen now at the Open Apple site, or subscribe in iTunes or the Zune Marketplace.

According to this Reuters report, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has been hired to act as an advisor on the new Steve Jobs biopic.  No, not that one.  This is the film currently being written by Aaron Sorkin and backed by Sony Pictures.  Woz’s role is being described as that of “tutor” for the technical aspects of the computers to be used in the film, as well as Jobs himself.

We’re fairly certain Woz won’t be at KansasFest this year but if you missed him hanging out in line at the Century City, CA Apple store for an iPad 3, you still have a chance to see him.  The jovial Apple co-founder will deliver the opening keynote at this year’s CloudCon Expo & Conference, ExpoNential announced Tuesday.  The conference is scheduled to take place at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco on July 12 – 13, 2012.  Woz, who currently serves as Chief Scientist at Fusion-io, will give a presentation titled, “How to Foster Creativity and Innovation in a Technical Environment.”

(via MacObserver)

The Apple Computer Company Partnership Agreement, which established Apple as a partnership between Jobs, Woz and Ron Wayne and was signed by all three co-founders, went for an incredible $1.35 million dollars at a Sotheby’s auction yesterday.  Once you add in all the various fees attached to the sale, the final cost weighs in at a hefty $1.6 million.  Expected to fetch as much as $150,000 in Tuesday’s auction, the three-page typewritten document was made obsolete when the new Apple Computer Co., was officially created on January 3, 1977 and bought out the nine month old partnership.  Wayne kept the document and later sold it to a collectible documents dealer who then sold it to a private collector in the late 1990s.

This should put to rest any doubt about the increasing hunger for early Apple II collectibles, especially through legitimate auction houses.

Then again, it’s still possible to get lucky and find a gem like this for a steal at an estate auction or thrift store.

Andy Kessler of Tech Ticker recently recorded a video interview with Steve Wozniak about the early days of personal computing:

We were gonna have machines that could out-calculate our companies’ huge million-dollar computers, and we the programmers … were gonna change the world with revolutionized education. We always spoke of the word “revolution” — all these big social changes we were going to bring … I wanted to help it happen. What I had to offer was my technical talents. I could build machines for these other people who wanted to use machines to better humanity … I thought, why don’t I design a computer from the ground up [with] every optimization where you save parts and you make things work, do more jobs than they did, work faster… and I added my color idea. The Apple II was this hot design that I came up with.

The full interview is embedded below.