"A new iPhone app inspired by the one-and-only game Apple sold for the original Macintosh.
In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, Steve Capps wrote a new game inspired by Through the Looking Glass. Relive the early days of Mac and discover what happens when Alice falls onto a chessboard."
Another gem from Atarimagazines.com. Originally appearing in the May, 1983 issue of Creative Computing, this evaluation by Owen W. Linzmayer examines some new Apple II games. It begins:
"One of the greatest fringe benefits of being a staff writer at Creative Computing is that I get to see most of the new games as they are released. Even though it is my job to review programs, I also spend a great deal of my free time playing my favorite games. Of the new games I 'had to' play this month, Aztec, Jawbreaker, and Spy's Demise are the ones that keep me at my Apple long after hours."
After searching literally for years, John Woodall of VintageMicros has located and preserved all of the original Apple Lisa 1 applications on modern, stable media.
This development is a real triumph in the Vintage Computing hobby, as this historic software has never before been archived! The problem has always been that the software was available on only the rare and rather unreliable Twiggy diskettes, which would be automatically serialized to the Lisa once they were used to install the application, rendering them forever unusable on any other Lisa. So to complete this project, John had to locate a complete set of all of the applications on original, useable and unused application diskettes.
As you may have noticed, we have been advertising for the last remaining application that John needed to complete the set - LisaTerminal - for quite some time. In fact there was no way to know if it even existed! Well, John finally found a new, still shrink-wrapped LisaTerminal set, and completed his quest!
Although this software is not available to the public at this time, John's contribution to the preservation of computer history for future generations is quite significant, and we congratulate and salute him for his efforts!
Today we return to the magical Wayback Machine at Archive.org to retrieve another lost nugget. This 1996 article by John Rizzo, subtitled "A sneak peek at Mac OS 8", is originally from Creative Mac.
It begins:
"The Mac of 1984 was the computer for the rest of us, because it meant not having to type in obscure commands. Instead, we could just point at a menu with a mouse and click. But liberating as the Mac was 12 years ago, it has grown into a system that requires considerable knowledge to use and maintain."
The fantastic 8-bit Apple II emulator for Mac OS X, Virtual ][ has been updated to version 5.8.5.
New in this release:
• Solved an issue (introduced in version 5.8) that caused flickering screen objects in some games (such as Swashbuckler, Bolo and Choplifter).
• Improved the floating bus feature; the intro of the game "Money Munchers" now works as it should.
• The "Search Apple II Disk Images" feature now not only searches for matching Apple II file names, but also for matching disk image file names.
• The Inspector can now show the Apple II screen as it would appear in any graphics mode.
• Substantially improved nibble copy and half-track copy in A2V2, resulting in much more reliable disk copies.
• Refined the keyboard mappings to more resemble the Apple II: shift-tab now acts as tab; numeric pad "clear" acts as esc.
• Increased default screen refresh rate from 20 Hz to 30 Hz.
• Fixed an issue that could result in stray pixels all over the screen when switching from 80-column text mode to graphics mode on an Apple //e.
• Fixed an issue that caused the Saturn memory card to behave like a 16K instead of a 128K memory card. more accessible.
The fantastic ROMless Lisa Emulator, LisaEm has been updated to version 1.2.2. It can be downloaded from http://lisaem.sunder.net/downloads.html. This version is mostly bug fixes instead of features.
Included in this release:
• Changed printing so that it auto-flushes print jobs. Printing works but the page size is slightly off so it tends to not line up properly when more than one page is printed.
• Cleaning up build.sh script + source code
• Fixed slot preferences - browse buttons between high/low ports were swapped.
• Fixed parallel port u/l assignments - opposite from what LOS uses
• More via6522.c cleanup/fixes.
• Renamed Profile menu to Parallel Port as it's more accurate
• Cleaning up Generator code so as to build it as its own library
• Looking into cleaning up unicode incompatibility bugs, rewrote bunches and bunches of string routines and fixed up some idiotic char * <-> wxString gymnastics.
• Looking into via6522 bugs for MacWorks and Xenix, no luck there yet.
Today we return to the magical Wayback Machine at Archive.org to retrieve another lost nugget. This 1994 article by Chris Oakes, discussing Apple's ill-fated online service eWorld, is originally from Creative Mac.
It begins:
"A small city sits atop a green hill beneath a sunny sky - this quaint scene, drawn in the style of a New Yorker cover, is the entry to eWorld, Apple's new online service.
Apple hopes this small town metaphor will attract millions of Americans who have yet to take the online plunge. These would-be surfers, Apple believes, have simply felt uncomfortable with going online. Online services' interfaces are too complicated, too difficult to navigate, and, consequently, the overwhelming amounts of information they contain have been, well, too overwhelming."
The YouTube Intro:
"Alice was announced at the launch and featured in the original brochure. The packaging was beautiful. The game disk was enclosed in a small cardboard box designed to look like a finely printed, old fashioned book, complete with an elaborate woodcut on the cover. Since Alice didn't take up the whole disk, Capps including a few other goodies with it, including a font and "Amazing", a fascinating maze generating program that he wrote."
Today we return to the magical Wayback Machine at Archive.org to retrieve another lost nugget. This 1998 article by John Rizzo, asking the question, "Should we believe in Apple's third OS strategy in three years?", is originally from Creative Mac.
It begins:
"May is the time of year for flower shows, spring festivals, and Apple's annual New Long-Term Operating System Strategy. Last year, the NeXT-based Rhapsody OS was going to save the company. Before that, it was Copland. Now it's Mac OS X (ten).
This year, we learned that Rhapsody failed. Or rather, Apple failed to convince software developers to rewrite their programs for it. Despite this shortcoming, Rhapsody isn't dead. This fall, you'll be able to buy version 1.0 of the full-featured operating system and install it on your Mac. You just won't be able to buy any software for it. Not to worry, though, says Apple, because by next year you'll have a choice of three operating systems to run on your Mac: Rhapsody, an updated Mac OS 8, and Mac OS X, a new hybrid of the first two."
