Apple II Bits

For the fifth year, the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, inducted new games into its Video Game Hall of Fame, part of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games. Among this year’s inductees were Mortal Kombat, Super Mario Kart, and Microsoft Windows Solitaire, recognized for their "icon-status, longevity, geographic reach, and influence".

Most years, I experience faux indignation when the museum snubs the Apple II by not including one of its original titles. But this year, even I can’t feign umbrage when considering one of the inductees was Colossal Cave.

Colossal Cave, the invention of Will Crowther and Don Woods, was the first text adventure game, one that was eventually ported to the Apple II, which was invented just a year later. Its induction to the Hall of Fave is a timely one, and not only because of the recent release of source code for Infocom games, all of which were inspired by Colossal Cave.

This past December, in my quest to visit all fifty of the United States, I crossed off Kentucky when I visited Mammoth Cave, off which Colossal Cave was based. Although I didn’t see any of the landmarks or rooms directly referenced in the game, nor was the game mentioned as part of the guided tour, I enjoyed an additional layer of meaning that was hidden from the other tourists.

I’d say more, except I wrote about my trip to Mammoth Cave in the spring 2019 issue of Juiced.GS, and there’s more about the cave’s history right here on this blog from nine years ago this month. Jason Scott’s 90-minute interview with Don Woods is also available on YouTube:

For once, even my grumpy persona gives a nod of approval to the Strong’s selection. Colossal Cave and Mammoth Cave are landmarks of a different sort, and it’s wonderful to see both being recognized.

(Hat tip to Dean Takahashi)

Last week, 6502 Workshop launched the second Kickstarter for Nox Archaist, an original 8-bit RPG for the Apple II.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2009377458/nox-archaist-an-8-bit-rpg-for-apple-ii-mac-and-pc

As a teacher of crowdfunding workshops at every level from local libraries to graduate programs at Emerson College and Harvard University, I’d been invited to consult on this campaign several months ago. I gave them some advice, though mostly minor, as they’d already learned their lessons from their first Kickstarter.

That previous crowdfunding attempt launched in September 2017 and was cancelled a month later after raising $19,656, well short of its $43,078 goal. Using production and marketing strategies they outlined in the March 2019 issue of Juiced.GS, the team behind Nox Archaist brought their costs down to $8,500. The second Kickstarter hit that goal in under two hours and raised more funding in 8.5 hours than their first campaign did in an entire month.

The campaign’s success is now a certainty; the only uncertainty was whether I should’ve backed it.

That’s not a question of the game’s quality, which looks amazing; the team’s dependability, in which I am confident; or my own eagerness, which is evident! But I always think twice before backing a product that I’ll ultimately be responsible for reviewing, or for editing a review of. Nox Archaist is a prime candidate for a Juiced.GS review or feature, and one could say that, by dropping $89 on the collector’s edition boxed set, I have an investment in the game’s success. I would counter that I’m simply preordering the game, which is less ethically complicated than a member of the press accepting a free review copy — but then, why preorder the game instead of just waiting to buy it when the finished product is made commercially available to the general public?

The answer has to do with the size of the Apple II community. There is almost no one making sizable (or any) profits off Apple II hardware or software these days; everyone does what they do for the love of it. The very first Kickstarter I ever backed was for Jason Scott’s sabbatical. Shortly thereafter, when interviewing him for a Computerworld article, I asked him a question that had been lingering in the back of my mind: why should I have backed his Kickstarter, primarily to fund the completion of the GET LAMP documentary, when he’ll be eventually make money off the finished documentary’s sale? Jason acknowledged that this was a valid question, and if I wanted to judge a product by its commercial viability, then I shouldn’t back such projects. But not every product that’s valuable or important is also commercially viable, and a single person’s pledge can make the difference between such a product existing and it not existing.

I want Nox Archaist to exist. Even if I never play it, I want to live in a world where Nox Archaist exists. Having spoken with 6502 Workshop’s Mark Lemmert online and at KansasFest, I know Nox Archaist is something he’s passionate about. He’s made his investment; now he’s asking us to match it with dollars.

If that means putting a disclaimer in an issue of Juiced.GS, then that’s worth it.

My reputation as any workplace’s resident (and only) Apple II expert began at my first salaried job as a high-school teacher. I’d often annoy the computer-science teacher, Ms. Lang, by extolling the virtues of BASIC as a programming language (she preferred Scheme); and when I had to substitute for her for a day, I taught her students how to use VisiCalc, as detailed in a Juiced.GS article.

One day, that same teacher came to me for help. She’d recently come back from a conference with a copy of an old Apple II program used to teach programming logic using circuits and gates — could I boot it in my emulator so she could assess its usefulness to her class? I’d never heard the game, but as soon as it started, I gasped. "This is the work of Warren Robinett!"

In Rocky’s Boots, players control a simple square as it navigates single-screen rooms, picking up items by colliding with them and transporting them through exits. Sword-like arrows guide the player from room to room.

It was the exact same design and interface as a game I’d grown up with: Adventure on the Atari 2600. Using a joystick and a single button, I’d guided that square on expeditions to distant castles, raiding their treasure while dodging and defeating terrifying, duck-like dragons, all while hoping not to be abducted by a random bat. Adventure’s place was cemented not just in my memory but also in history for featuring the first-ever Easter egg: a hidden room with the developer’s name, Warren Robinett.

Warren Robinett’s name in Adventure’s hidden room.

It was thanks to that Easter egg that I knew who must be responsible for Rocky’s Boots. It’s rare for a developer to have such an identifiable style, but when I saw Rocky’s Boots, I knew it had to be, if not the same developer, then at least the same engine. I’d never researched Robinett’s portfolio beyond that historical Atari 2600 game; until that moment in my high school office, I didn’t realize Robinett had adapted his work to any other platform. But in a video demoing the 1982 eudcational title, Robinett describes it: "It uses some of the same ideas from the Adventure game for Atari: A network of interlinked screens, objects that you could pick up…"

I haven’t played Rocky’s Boots since that day in 2005, but it recently become easier to explore this educational curiosity, thanks to the work of 4am:

Rocky's Bootshttps://t.co/IJAlGkRb0s

Thanks to @hoserama99 for the disk!#wozaday pic.twitter.com/YMImOMFN03

— @a2_4am@mastodon.social (@a2_4am) March 27, 2019

My thanks to 4am for preserving this classic, to Robinett for developing it, and to Karen Lang for introducing me to it. Now go try it yourself and enjoy this adventure on the Apple II!

I know some classical musicians who are quite up in arms over virtual orchestras. Why hire a violinist or flautist to interpret your sheet music when you can simply set your composition software to flawlessly perform your digital score?

This is not a new phenomenon: the player piano, invented in 1895, requires no human operator, either. The last time I saw such an instrument was at Hildene, the summer home of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert. The estate’s player organ boasts an extensive collection of vintage music scrolls, most of which are now too brittle to be used. But to keep the organ fed, it has been modified with a USB port through which the scrolls’ digital equivalents can be loaded.

This isn’t the first time player piano and computer technologies have been integrated. In the 1980s, the Apple II often played a critical role in creating music for these automated performers, as seen in this profile.

The Apple II has only a brief visual cameo and little mention in the narration. But fear not! A more exhaustive look at the Apple II can be seen in a similar video I shared here eight years ago.

Pianos don’t need computers to make music; and, with the power of MIDI, computers don’t need pianos. But no matter the era, the two together are an inimitable duet.

(Hat tip to rryland on reddit)

Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are well-known developers of game consoles — but some players prefer to interface with those devices with third-party peripherals. When they do, Razer is one of the go-to manufacturers of controllers, keyboards, and mice. Razer is also yet another modern game company that might not exist if not for the Apple II, which got 41-year-old Razer founder Min-Liang Tan hooked on gaming. He waxed eloquent about these classic games in this recent interview with Abacus News.

Tan got his start on Lode Runner and Rescue Raiders, but he specifically called out Ultima IV’s virtue system as being groundbreaking. "All of a sudden, it wasn’t just about hack and slash and killing everything. You need some kind of a moral code."

I’m not familiar with the Apple II’s adoption rate in Tan’s native Singapore, but it apparently made its way into Tan’s hands when it mattered most. As far as I know, Tan never developed hardware or software for the Apple II, unlike Steve Chiang, the current Executive Vice President of Worldwide Production and Studios at Warner Bros. Games. But that he remembers those classic titles all these decades later and cites them among his favorites is a testament to the influence and staying power of Apple II games.

Maybe we’ll see Razer developing new Apple II joysticks next!

Editing several Juiced.GS articles on copy protection and assembling them into a single PDF has given me a second-hand opportunity to learn all the ways that Apple II floppy disks could be made uncopiable. While defeating piracy is a publisher’s right, copy protection can also create unnecessary and often unanticipated hurdles for legitimate software owners.

4am to the rescue. This anonymous hacker debuted on the Apple II scene five years ago last month and has since preserved hundreds of programs that might’ve otherwise been lost to history. Not only does 4am tackle individual disks and protection schemes; they also look for patterns that can be anticipated and automatically defeated, resulting in the cracking program Passport.

4am’s latest challenge: a pre-boot program that enables floppy disks to boot on machines not yet invented when the software was published. Its prerelease name was BroderBooter.

Update: I have completed my "BroderBooter" pre-boot program, and now I can successfully boot original disks of Choplifter, Dueling Digits, Labyrinth, Seafox, Serpentine, Star Blazer, Eggs-It, Horizon V, High Orbit, Phaser Fire, Russki Duck, and Zenith on my Apple //e.

— @a2_4am@mastodon.social (@a2_4am) March 8, 2019

Just a week later, the program was officially released under a different name, Anti-M.

It is the same with a better name.

— @a2_4am@mastodon.social (@a2_4am) March 17, 2019

Having never directly encountered the problem that Anti-M solves, I asked for more details. 4am patiently walked me through this program’s purpose.

https://twitter.com/kgagne/status/1104782094285316096

They wrote:

Certain early games by Broderbund and Gebelli Software failed to boot on a //e or later. They would boot partway then display an “M” error code because they were looking for a “genuine” Apple ROM and didn’t recognize the //e. I wrote a program to control the boot process long enough (just patching in memory, never on disk) to disable the ROM check and allow these games to boot on any Apple II. [S]o you run my “pre-booter” program, insert your original disk (Choplifter or whatever, lots of different games supported), and press RETURN. That’s it. Then the magic starts, boot tracing and patching memory. But all you’ll see is your game boot and load instead of erroring out. It’ll be open source and hosted on GitHub, but I won’t link to it here until the big 1.0 announcement.

Twitter being what it is, even the creator of that ROM check popped into the conversation.

I apologize for that ROM checksum, you have an original version of that game. Apple contacted us and gave me a Super ][ under NDA to fix the issue.

— Roland Gustafsson (@rolandgust) March 8, 2019

I’m glad we have someone like 4am watching out for those Apple II users trying to keep their machines and floppies alive!

(Hat tip to Andrew Roughan)