Apple II Bits

It seems you can’t turn around these days without bumping into Jason Scott. Because putting Apple II magazines into the Internet Archive, donating documentaries to Apple II users, or compiling collections of Apple II crack screens isn’t enough to keep a guy busy, he’s decided to tackle his greatest project yet.

Having produced both BBS: The Documentary and GET LAMP in the last five years, Scott now wants to more than double his filmography. His goal is to publish not one, not two, but THREE more documentaries in the next four years — one each about the 6502 processor, tape as a medium, and arcades as places. The 6502 documentary should be of particular interest to Apple II users, since it was on that chip that Woz based our favorite machine.

Scott’s last Kickstarter project set out to raise $25,000 with which to complete GET LAMP, which he had mostly already filmed. This time, Scott wants $100,000 to pursue three films simultaneously. I found the project less than a day after its debut, at which point he had already raised $12,000. By the end of the first day, he’d broken the $30,000 mark. Will the project maintain the momentum enough to cross the Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing threshold by the November 12 deadline?

It’s easy to imagine not contributing to that inertia: commercial products should be financially solvent, funding themselves through their own sales. But for niche topics like this, especially those that are independently produced and don’t have big-time backers, the truth is that these films won’t exist unless fans like us support them. So I’ve tossed him a few dollars (as a belated birthday gift — Scott turned 41 this past Tuesday) as a deposit toward these films, at least two of which interest me. There is little variety to the affordable funding options, but you can donate any value you want — the tiers are only for the rewards. So pick a sum that fits your budget and help Scott meet his.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/textfiles/the-jason-scott-documentary-three-pack

Piracy is as much an issue today as it was thirty years ago: gamers who pay for their software are often penalized for the actions of those who won’t. But somewhere between the DRM and the theft is the actual hack. Today, that often amounts to little more than releasing a torrent of a disk image — once you’ve acquired and installed the warez, the experience is little different from a legitimate one. That wasn’t the case with the Apple II.

When the hacking medium was not DVD but 5.25" floppy, hackers had to break a different copy protection scheme for each piece of software. They demanded acknowledgement for their hard work, often placing their byline in the opening splash screen, even if it meant removing the programmer’s or publisher’s credit. Some especially creative hackers went beyond that simple substitution by editing the screen at large, producing original works of art.

Jason Scott has compiled an extensive collection of these crack screens. As far as I can see, there’s 794 screens, though fewer total games are represented, as often the same image is displayed in both color and monochrome; I would estimate the gallery includes 572 unique games. It’s fascinating to see both the art and the creative handles by which the pirates were known.

There’s little I can say about the Apple II pirate scene that hasn’t already been presented more exhaustively and eloquently by Scott in this presentation from Rubicon 2003.

However, there have been new developments since then. At KansasFest 2010, Martin Haye hacked Wizardry, producing his own splash screen for the occasion. With so much work being put into the crack itself, a programming genius such as Haye shouldn’t have to work even harder to leave his visual mark.

Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe agrees and, at the request of Daniel Kruszyna, has created T40, a 40-column text-based editor. Itself a 24-hour hack job, T40 runs on any Apple II and offers an impressive array of keyboard commands with which to design and save ASCII art.

"Krüe" has started compiling images created in this program and welcomes your submissions via email. The collection thus far can be seen online, where you can also download an Applesoft BASIC self-running slideshow to display the artwork natively on your Apple II.

I make no commentary on the legality of ethicality of piracy — but the ones who engage in it are capable of amazing works of genius and artistry, which have just been made a bit easier.

(Hat tip to Mark Pilgrim)

Get Lamp, Jason Scott’s documentary on the history of text adventures is interactive fiction, is comprehensive, spanning two DVDs and multiple episodes.

But it doesn’t cover everything, nor should it: any published work has to retain its focus or else spiral out of control, losing everyone’s interest along the way. Fortunately, as with everything else in life, for that which we want to know more about, there’s the Internet.

Most impressive is Julian Dibbell’s 5,000+ words dissertation on the life and times of Stephen Bishop, a slave in pre-Civil War Kentucky. That doesn’t sound like a text adventure tale, but it is in fact the origin of Colossal Cave. Bishop was assigned the role of tour guide of Mammoth Cave, the cavern that served as the basis for the original text adventure. Bishop wasn’t merely a spelunker, though, but an imaginative and empathetic storyteller who brought the cave to life with the creative names and yarns he spun for his tourists. Consider this example:

Bishop made the most of this ability to size people up, making sure all comers got the spectacle they felt they’d paid for. Most were easily satisfied; others came hungry to explore uncharted cave. Bishop catered to them all, at times bringing the more adventurous along with him on his discoveries — at others, apparently, letting them think they were discovering territory he had in fact already surveyed. As expert as he was in exploring, in other words, he was expert, too, in delivering what was then a novel sort of product but is now known familiarly (to students of latemodern marketing culture, anyway) as the commodified experience.

Those qualities could be just as easily ascribed to Will Crowther, who, almost 150 years later, also brought people to Colossal Cave, except in digital form. Having previously been married to the woman with whom he’d explored Mammoth Cave, the place naturally held memories that made it difficult to revisit after the divorce. With his introduction to Dungeons & Dragons, Crowther thought he might meld his two pastimes into a new game he could play with his children. Thus was born Colossal Cave.

Dibbell’s work is a brilliant and sweeping narrative, reminding us of the recurring themes of exploration and imagination throughout humanity’s history, how unrelated threads can weave together, and how much older are stories are than we often realize. It’s well worth the time of any gamer or historian — or just anyone who can appreciate an engrossing story.

(Hat tip to Jason Scott)

Text adventures, or interactive fiction, are currently en vogue, as evidenced by more than the release of the medium’s own documentary. Beyond GET LAMP and its niche market, IF has been making appearances in even mainstream media, leading the way for new and exciting developments in this classic gaming genre.

My cousin, bless her heart, emailed me this clip from the CBS sitcom Big Bang Theory, asking, "Do you remember these games, or are they before your time?"

I suspect most of BBT‘s geeky audience will recognize and appreciate this nod to gaming’s textual origins, as even modern gaming has taken to acknowledging its roots. Earlier this month, Activision released the highly anticipated first-person shooter, Call of Duty: Black Ops (or CoD:BlOps for short). The game includes an Easter Egg: hidden within but accessible from a virtual computer terminal in the game’s militaristic setting is none other than Zork itself. This treat is made possible by Activision’s purchase of Infocom in 1986, seven years after the company was founded and three before it was shut down.

Although this bonus feature is an amazing opportunity to introduce the current generation of gamers to interactive fiction, Jason Scott points out an inherent flaw in the context in which Activision has chosen to do so. Players of CoD:BlOps are expecting an intense, fast-paced, and violent experience, filled with twitch reactions and realistic graphics. To ask them to slow down, sit at a virtual keyboard, and be challenged by the puzzles of Zork only brings into contrast how far gaming has come, and the obstacles IF now faces.

Nonetheless, those obstacles are being tackled — and overcome — by the likes of Andrew Plotkin. This IF designer, interviewed in GET LAMP, recently set out to use Kickstarter to raise enough money to quit his day job and dedicate himself to creating text adventures for Mac, PC, and iPhone. He hoped to raise $8,000 in 30 days; in the first twelve hours, he raised $12,000.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-interactive-fiction-for-the-iphone

Many of Plotkin’s current works can be played on his homepage, where we should expect to find the fruits of his labors continue to be published once his sabbatical begins.

In the meantime, if you want to try a point-and-click interface that explores abstract concepts in an interactive fiction-like experience, try A House in California, loosely based on the Apple II classic Mystery House. It’s one example of how far IF actually has come in the past three decades — even if it is no Call of Duty.

(Hat tips to Andy Molloy and Jason Scott)

Those who learn history may help us avoid it, but sometimes, the details escape prediction. When I interviewed Jason Scott for Computerworld, I asked him about closed systems like Facebook and the iPad. His response:

People think Facebook is an unstoppable juggernaut … and we have to fight, because if we don’t, it’ll always be like this … It’s really bad to flip out, as if this were life and death. We’re doing the same thing with the iPad, all this crapola of closed system vs open system, with people rooting for companies like they’re sports teams. At the same time there was the Altair and the Atari 800 and the Apple II, we still had the Atari 2600 and the NES — two completely closed systems that worked dependably. We lived with it, it was fine, and now they’re gone and there are other things. So yeah, Facebook is pretty terrible with privacy, and I’m bothered by the number of people who happily defend ease over freedom, but Facebook won’t survive more than another five years in their current form. You won’t recognize them in five years, they’ll be something completely different. They can’t survive as they are. Look at MySpace or Friendster or Orkut. There’s a lot of space in the ecosystem. I’m not too worried. We won’t even be thinking about it by October.

If Scott was referring to Facebook, then he may’ve been right, as there hasn’t been nearly as much discussion about the social network‘s privacy controls lately as there was in the spring. But if he meant the iPad, well — I guess he didn’t see Lion coming.

Apple’s next Macintosh operating system will feature an inbuilt App Store, similar to what iTunes already offers for iOS devices. Already, alarmists are asking: is this the end of the Mac as an open platform?

I don’t believe it is, but Apple isn’t alone in moving toward more closed architectures — almost everything today’s consumer uses is meant to be used as its designer intended. This approach may be more elegant for the end user, but it’s also more restrictive, prohibiting innovative workflows and custom solutions to individual problems. At KansasFest 2010, I moderated a panel on this very topic, after being inspired by an article Ivan Drucker wrote for Juiced.GS.

Closed systems aren’t just frustrating for end users. Such proprietary natures discourage curiosity and learning — essential skills for any future programmer or artist, as recently noted by Wil Wheaton in a Geek a Week podcast interview (time indices 16:21–19:36). The former Star Trek star reminisced about fiddling with shortwave radios and how easy it was for kids to take things apart and learn how they worked. “It’s a shame that so many things are so closed down and locked down these days,” said Wheaton. “That kid that 25 years ago would be inspired by reverse-engineering a game on their Apple IIe is going to have a lot more difficult time doing the same thing today.”

The emergent popularity of computer science has given many more students and at many more ages the opportunity to learn computer programming, but those formal structures are far different from the self-taught programmers of a previous generation who could LIST their favorite software, study it, and even modify it. Doing so on a modern Mac is already nearly impossible, and I don’t see the Mac App Store worsening the situation. But it does suggest a continuing formalization of the relationship between vendor and user, and a further demarcation between user and programmer.

The year 2010 began with the unveiling of the Apple iPad and ended with the potential diminishment of the Mac as an open platform. Neither digital historian nor Starfleet ensign can see the future these announcements will usher.

If there was ever a year to attend KansasFest, 2010 was it. Besides a fantastic keynote by former Beagle Bros president Mark Simonsen and the triumphant return of Bite the Bag, every attendee received a free copy of Jason Scott‘s two-DVD text adventure documentary, GET LAMP. How cool is that?

Scott’s work has made interactive fiction into a hot topic, with plenty of buzz around the net. Episode #8 of the video podcast Gameshelf (iTunes) looks briefly at modern incarnations of the genre, including where to play it online for free without needing an emulator or interpreter, with recommendations of specific beginner games, such as Dreamhold. In the Gameshelf episode, you can see an Apple II at 1:33, just after watching an awkward gameplay session of Action Castle, the live-action text adventure that was played at KansasFest 2010’s Friday night banquet.

A melding of Scott’s two interests, text adventures and dial-up BBSs, can be found in the game Digital: A Love Story, available for free on Mac, Windows, and Linux. The game tells a narrative in the form of a dial-up bulletin board, which was largely a lost medium in the life of the game’s young creator, Christine Love. Scott interviewed her this summer about her work researching and creating the game.

There’s more that can be said about text adventures than can fit in any one blog post or even one documentary, so expect this topic to be revisited time and again here and elsewhere. And if you still haven’t seen GET LAMP, it may be coming to a city near you.

(Hat tip to Taking Inventory)