Apple II Bits

On the KansasFest email list, Michael Sternberg proposed to organize a third annual Apple II game tournament. This is Sternberg’s forté, as he not only ran the Structris competition in 2013–2014, but modified Martin Haye’s original game to create the tournament edition used in the event. I captured some of Sternberg’s talent and passion in this video for Computerworld:

Sternberg has asked, what game should we play this year? Puzzle games seem a popular choice: GShisen is a KansasFest classic, having been featured in tournaments run first by Juiced.GS founder Max Jones, then by me. Structris, being inspired by Tetris, is also a puzzler, but with an action component that I enjoy. That hybrid nature also describes I classified in Juiced.GS as one of my favorite Apple II games of all-time. Its creator, Steve Chiang, is big in the modern gaming industry; and its artist, Dave Seah, recently made an appearance in the Apple II Enthusiasts group on Facebook. Maybe they’d sponsor a competition with some sort of promotion or giveaway!

But for those retrocomputing enthusiasts whose reaction times have not yet faded with age, there are plenty of action games to choose from, too. Retrobrite afficionado Javier Rivera, who this year will make his KansasFest debut, recently demonstrated two color LCD screens displaying the same video output simultaneously. His software for this test? Karateka.

It’s a dual duel!

Charles Mangin proposed we hack this game to allow a second player to control the opponent. Head-to-head Karateka? I’m in!

KansasFest is a week over, and all I have is memories.

Memories — and an awesome mug.

https://twitter.com/16kRAM/status/492749522863263744

For the second consecutive year, attendee Michael Sternberg hosted a Structris tournament based on his version of Martin Haye’s original Tetris game. I entered and, after a poor showing in 2013, rebounded in 2014: I had the highest score in the first round (100 points); went up against the reigning champion and broke the world record in the second round (249 points on level 17); and, in the third and final round, defeated the developer himself. It was pretty epic.

To give something back, I’ve created a Let’s Play video of Structris, coinciding with last week’s 25th anniversary of the North American launch of the Nintendo Game Boy, which came with Tetris. Enjoy!

What are you doing next weekend? If you’re in the Boston area and want to meet some fellow Apple II users, or learn more about this machine that’s developed such a rabid community, then consider coming to @party.

A demoparty founded in 2010, @party is all about squeezing the most impressive graphics, sound, and functionality out of the oldest machines. Think of it like HackFest, except for all retrocomputers and lasting all weekend. But you don’t need to be a programmer to compete — there are music, graphics, ASCII art, and other competitions, or "compos". If you just want to attend, there’s still plenty for you, including chiptune concerts, text adventure tutorials, and more.

For the first time in @party’s history, "more" includes me! I’ll be the weekend’s first last official speaker, with a presentation on Saturday at 1:30 5:00 PM EDT entitled "The Apple II lives! KansasFest and beyond". Likely to be an adaptation of last summer’s presentation to the Denver Apple Pi users’ group, I’ll deliver an overview of the Apple II history, hardware, community, events, outlets, and more.

At least one other KansasFest alumnus will be there: krüe, an award-winning demo artist. Krüe is a demoparty fiend and will be sure to show you the ropes.

Hackers hacking their hacks at @party 2010.

Registration ends TONIGHT (June 11) at midnight. Tickets are only $56.02 — not bad for a weekend of camaraderie and retro-fun. Come enjoy your first demoparty!

As I’ve discussed in Open Apple but not previously on Apple II Bits, you absolutely must check out Jimmy Maher’s blog, The Digital Antiquarian. His exhaustive, academic, focused writings on the Apple II and aspects of its history and games (specifically what he refers to a "ludic narratives") are fun and informative reads worth making the time for.

His travels through Apple’s history have most recently taken him to the works of Silas Warner, best known for the seminal stealth game Castle Wolfenstein but also developer of RobotWar, published by MUSE Software in 1981. True to its PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) origins, the game served as an instructional tool for teaching programming, challenging users to create routines that describe the behavior of a combative robot. As Maher describes:

You don’t get to design your robot in the physical sense; each is identical in size, in the damage it can absorb, in acceleration and braking, and in having a single rotable radar dish it can use to “see” and a single rotatable gun it can use to shoot. The programming language you work with is extremely primitive even by the standard of BASIC, with just a bare few commands. Actual operation of the robot is accomplished by reading from and writing to a handful of registers. That can seem an odd way to program today — it took me a while to wrap my mind around it again after spending recent months up to my eyebrows in Java — but in 1981, when much microcomputer programming involved PEEKing and POKEing memory locations and hardware registers directly, it probably felt more immediately familiar.

Two to five players would then enter their routines into an arena, and may the strongest robot win!

Inspired by the RobotWar competitions Computer Gaming World once hosted, Maher is looking to resurrect these epic duels with a contest of his own. One cool feature not possible at the time of RobotWar’s debut: Maher will do a screencast of each battle and upload the video recording, so that players can not just know the outcome but watch how it came to be. Contestants can tweak their winning ‘bots between battles, evolving them to face ever stiffer competition. Grand prizes await the mightiest mech.

This sounds like great fun, in the tradition of HackFest and RetroChallenge. I applaud Maher for actively supporting and even expanding the Apple II community, and I encourage anyone reading this to consider entering the contest.

One shall stand… and one shall fall!

One of my favorite KansasFest activities is the HackFest, which challenges KFest attendees to write the coolest Apple II program possible within the time constraints of the convention. My programming skills are meager, I found that creativity counted for more than technical accomplishment. I used Applesoft, GSoft, or Spectrum scripting to place in many consecutive competitions, until finally my I tapped dry my well of ideas and switched over to the judging panel.

HackFest continues to be a popular feature of KansasFest, though some have called for it to be less stringent in its rules. “Why should someone have to be at KansasFest to compete in HackFest?” I’ve been asked. Partly it’s for the contestants’ benefit: the synergy and inspiration abound at KFest, with contestants often working alongside each other, advising them on particular programming challenges. Such was the case with my own now-infamous Maxster, which I believe placed second to my roommate Geoff Weiss‘s Taipan script.

Nonetheless, it remains true that, although everyone should attend KansasFest, not everyone can. For them, there is an alternative: the RetroChallenge. This competition is held every summer and is not restricted to the Apple II. RetroChallenge occasionally is held in the winter as well, to keep everyone’s programming skills current. Courtesy volunteer urbancamo (filling in for traditional host Simon Williams), the RetroChallenge 2011 Winter Warmup is now underway. From the event’s Web site:

In a nutshell, the RetroChallenge is a loosely disorganised gathering of RetroComputing enthusiasts who collectively do stuff with old computers for a month.

The event is very much open to interpretation: individuals set [their] own challenges, which can range from programming to multimedia work; hardware restoration to exploring legacy networking — or just plain [messing] around. It really doesn’t matter what you do, just so long as you do it.

While the RetroChallenge has its competitive side, it’s not really a contest — it’s more like global thermonuclear war: everyone can play, but no [one person] really wins.

Come on — give it a go!

The rules aren’t quite as stringent as HackFest’s and permit the use of any 20th-century pre-Pentium computer, including game consoles and PDAs. Check out the event’s discussion forum and Twitter feed for more details.

I won’t be able to participate this year, focused as I am on retrocomputing multimedia projects that require no programming — but I encourage all programmers, both budding and veteran, to get out there and represent the Apple II!