Collaborate Disseminate
Vintage parts may be documented, but that doesn’t mean they’re particularly useful or accessible. If the phrase “eyestrain from unsearchable, badly-scanned PDF datasheets” makes your lower eyelid twitch in sympathy, read on.
While [Bald Engineer] was researching how he might make a portable Apple II, he was delighted to find …read more
Continue reading Bit Preserve: A Sanctuary For Modern Captures Of Vintage Schematics
The Altair 8800 was, to its creators, a surprise hit. Despite looking nothing like what we would today consider to be a computer, it sold thousands of units almost immediately upon its launch, way back in 1975. A few years later, the Apple II burst onto the scene, and the …read more
Yet again the Apple II community has found something extremely cool to do with the vintage computer. Continue reading This Programmer Turned the 36-Year-Old Apple IIe into a Robot
For one reason or another, we’re going with a retro-futuristic 80s aesthetic in this case, [Mike] decided to turn an Apple IIe into a robot. If you have to ask why, you’ll never know, but this project does have some interesting things going for it. There’s a voice synthesizer, a brand spankin’ new power supply, and it rolls around on the floor thanks to Apple BASIC.
Since this is a mobile robot, there needs to be a power supply in there somewhere. The Apple II had a fantastic switching power supply, but it ran off mains voltage. To make this …read more
Continue reading Travelling The Oregon Trail With An Apple II Robot
The demoscene is an active place to this day, with enthusiasts around the world continuing to push the envelope as far as the capabilities of machines are concerned. [Deater], along with a skilled team, produced this Apple II Megademo which won first place at Demosplash 2018.
The demo starts with an intentional tease, with an emulated C64 BASIC startup screen which splits to reveal the title card. White-on-blue text isn’t the easiest on the Apple II, due to palette limitations, but it’s necessary for the joke to work. The following scenes make heavy use of mode-switching techniques in the middle …read more
Continue reading Apple II Megademo Is Countin’ Cycles and Takin’ Names
TRON is a science fiction classic, hitting cinemas in the midst of the burgeoning home computer era. It’s the film that created the famous light cycle, which spawned many video game recreations in the following years. Many years ago now, [Daniel] decided to flex his programming muscles by coding a version of the game for the Apple IIgs, with accidentally excellent results.
In the film, the characters find an escape from the light cycle game by forcing another player to crash into the walls of the play area. The resulting explosion left a hole, allowing the players to exit the …read more
TRON is a science fiction classic, hitting cinemas in the midst of the burgeoning home computer era. It’s the film that created the famous light cycle, which spawned many video game recreations in the following years. Many years ago now, [Daniel] decided to flex his programming muscles by coding a version of the game for the Apple IIgs, with accidentally excellent results.
In the film, the characters find an escape from the light cycle game by forcing another player to crash into the walls of the play area. The resulting explosion left a hole, allowing the players to exit the …read more
Brush up on some mostly-accurate US history with a game that came on floppy disks. Continue reading The Apple II Edutainment Game ‘All About America’ Was Cracked Just in Time for the Midterms
The Apple II was the popular darling that truly kicked off the ascention of the company that would later bring you darlings such as the iMac, iPod, and iPhone. The brainchild of the legendary Steve Wozniak, it was a low-cost home computer that made use of some interesting compromises to create video output with the bare minimum components. This can make it difficult if you want to output full-bitmap graphics on the Apple II – but it is certainly possible.
[cybernesto] set about completing this task, and released VBMP on GitHub. Programmed in assembly, it builds upon the work of …read more
[Stephen Edwards] had some time one Christmas. So he took a DE2 FPGA board and using VHDL built a pretty faithful reproduction of an Apple II+ computer. He took advantage of VHDL modules for the 6502 CPU and PS/2 keyboard, and focused more on the video hardware and disk emulation.
According to [Stephen], you can think of the Apple II as a video display that happens to have a computer in it. The master clock is a multiple of the color burst frequency, and the timing was all geared around video generation. [Stephen’s] implementation mimics the timing, although using more …read more
