Apple II Bits

Text adventures are alive and well, including at KansasFest. Not only did Charles Mangin place in last week’s HackFest courtesy his Inform 7 adventure, but several live-action text adventures have been played at KFest over the years. In 2010, 2014 & 2015, I emceed Parsely adventures, where a human replaces the parser and accepts two-word commands from audience members, responding with the results. Jared Sorensen created the Parsely games, sold online and at game conventions such as PAX East. Although the nearly dozen scripts appear to currently be out of print, that’s about to change courtesy the Parsely Games Kickstarter.

This Kickstarter has already successfully met its crowdfunding goal of $12,000, well before its August 11 deadline. With these funds, Sorensen will publish a hardcover book of the ten existing Parsely adventures, including the three games I’ve brought to KansasFest: Action Castle, Jungle Adventure, and Space Station. plus two original titles. The book will also include two original games, bringing the total to 12. All these can be yours for $15 (PDF) or $30 (hardcopy), with rewards all the way up to $2,500, where Sorensen will fly anywhere in the USA or Europe to run a Parsely adventure for you and your group.

While I’m tempted to buy the ten-pack of books and redistribute them at KansasFest 2018, the product will not be ready until a month later, in August 2018 — and that’s assuming it ships on time, which Kickstarters do not have a good record of doing. But Parsely adventures have already brought so much joy to KansasFest, the least I can do is support their continued existence. Count me among this campaign’s backers!

KansasFest 2017 is this week, and more than a dozen attendees will be arriving with shirts from KFests past to make a group photo happen. While I was looking for examples of previous such photos, I came across this artifact.

Dain Neater snapped this photo outside Avila University at KansasFest 2002. Here I am, chatting with Ryan Suenaga and Steve Gozdziewski. In this moment, Ryan is in his first year as editor-in-chief of Juiced.GS, and Steve is the committee chair of KansasFest.

Legends.

When I think back to those early KansasFests, what I remember most aren’t the sessions or the product reveals; it’s the camaraderie. It’s finally meeting people whom I’d known for years from GEnie or CompuServe and clicking with them immediately. It’s the laughter of delight in being among people who get each other. Ryan and Steve were a big part of that, not only by creating the platforms, but by also being wonderful people to be around. They were weird and quirky and absolutely selfless, and they shaped my early experiences in the Apple II community.

Ryan died on April 24, 2011, at age 44; Steve passed away on December 31, 2016, at 69. I wrote their obituaries for both A2Central.com and Juiced.GS.

Everyone who attends KansasFest was or is at some point a new friend. And with KansasFest 2017 hitting its attendance cap at one hundred Apple II enthusiasts, I look forward to making many new friends this year.

But damned if I don’t miss the old ones.

Earlier this year, I wrote a tribute to an Apple II user who had passed away — something I’ve now done too many damn times. But in remembering Steve Gozdziewski, I also recalled sharing this moment with him at KansasFest 2002:

Many of those pictured had been coming to KansasFest for years (2002 was the event’s fourteenth year, and my fifth), and we spontaneously decided to represent our long lineage by donning the various years’ shirts that we’d happened to bring with us. (We staged a similar shot another year, though I can’t seem to find it in the available archives.)

That got me thinking: why not plan another shirt photo? With this month’s KansasFest being the 29th, it’s unlikely we’ll have representatives from every year — but it’d be fun to try!

So if you’ve ever attended a previous KansasFest and are one of the hundred who are coming to KansasFest 2017, please use the below form to indicate which years’ KansasFest shirts you own. A week from today, July 10, I’ll email everyone their packing instructions to ensure we show up in Kansas City with as complete a set as possible!

Let’s create another photo by which to remember the many years and friends we’ve shared across the decades.

At KansasFest, Apple II users from around the world meet and share a unique experience. The games we play there — be it computer games like Structris and KABOOM!, board games such as Lode Runner, or the card game Oregon Trail — forge friendships that are often revisited only once a year at KansasFest.

But sometimes, the stars align to reunite those friends in new and unusual venues. That happened this past weekend, when Juiced.GS associate editor Andy Molloy, staff writer Ivan Drucker, Retro Computing Roundtable co-host Carrington Vanston, and I made the trek to the American Classic Arcade Museum at Funspot in Laconia, New Hampshire, USA.

ACAM is the world’s largest video game arcade, as determined by Guinness World Records. With over 300 machines from the 1970s and 1980s, the arcade is home to coin-ops both classic and rare — all still just a token each. I first discovered this arcade thirty years ago, when its games were new. I returned every summer for over a decade, then relegated it to a childhood memory for another ten years. I finally started going back in 2006 and recruited Andy in 2007. Having now been making an annual pilgrimage to Funspot for nearly a decade, we decided it was time to evangelize and spread the good word to Carrington and Ivan, who’d never been there.

Carrington, who co-founded the podcast No Quarter, was of course familiar with many of Funspot’s games, but Ivan knew few beyond his favorites. He schooled us all in Donkey Kong but then proved vulnerable to the first shrubbery he encountered in Paper Boy. We each sought out individual rounds of Marble Madness, Frogger, Asteroids, and Robotron 2064, but the most fun was had when we went head-to-head. Ivan, Andy, and I lost to the computer in Super Sprint. Carrington, Andy, and I then demolished cities in Rampage, after which Carrington, Andy, and Ivan launched bombs at Sinistar; we all four finally teamed up to play to the eleventh dungeon of Gauntlet II.

There were two surprising discoveries of the day. The first was Donkey Kong II, which looked and played like a sequel to the Nintendo classic — except Ivan had never heard of it. Was it possible for a game with such storied lineage to have escaped his notice for so long?

The answer is no: Donkey Kong II is an unofficial ROM hack consisting of the original game’s four levels and four new levels. It made its arcade debut at Funspot in 2006 but is more easily playable online.

The other surprise was Chiller, a disturbing lightgun game. Developed by Exidy of Death Race infamy, Chiller challenges players to shoot as many human prisoners as possible in a short amount of time. These living targets are found in torture chambers, ensconced in guillotines, racks, and other vehicles of pain, waiting for the player to deliver the fatal blow. While it sounds perverse, my gaming buds excused it by how cartoonish its artwork was, saying they’d never play a modern game with motion-capture video that featured such ghoulish, gratuitous violence. Still, I enjoyed playing the role of the disapproving prude, sternly frowning and shaking my head in their direction with each playthrough, while in the back of my mind wondering how I could excuse my ownership of the NES port.

Due to how far our far-flung party had to travel to return home, we did not have time to cap the evening at Pinball Wizard, another excellent arcade in southern New Hampshire. We were also left with a heavy cupful of leftover tokens from Funspot. With this many games, there is never enough time to play them all.

Fortunately, Funspot — much like KansasFest and the friendships it forms — is forever.

Today is the first day after KansasFest 2016. It’s a day when I, like all 83 of this year’s attendees — the largest turnout in my 19 consecutive years of attendance — am in a delirious stupor from too much excitement and too little sleep. I have unpacking to do, software to test, publications to read, photos to process, and memories to cherish. It’s an event that will stay with me for a long time — at least until KansasFest 2017, scheduled for July 18–23 at Rockhurst University.

In the meantime, I admire all the contributions made by the attendees and the committee, from organizing the event to giving presentations to livestreaming the videos. But as a YouTube content creator, one of the KansasFest creations I admire the most comes once again from Steve Weyhrich. Just prior to KansasFest 2015, Steve — who once built an entire Apple II in Minecraft — debuted the music video "KFest Funk", an inspired parody of the 2014 tune "Uptown Funk". For KansasFest 2016, Steve decided to kick it old school by reimagining the 1982 classic "Eye of the Tiger". The result is the music video "Week of the KFest":

Many of the photos Steve used in each of his last two music videos are my own, yet he puts them in a far more imaginative context than I could ever imagine. Not only that, but his audio and video production qualities are significantly higher than my own, despite his use of iMovie compared to Final Cut Pro. Why isn’t this creative genius a YouTube star?

My thanks to Steve for this fun memento that we can share with our friends and family who don’t quite understand what KansasFest is all about!

At KansasFest, you’ll discover software and hardware you’re unlikely to see anywhere else — yet diehard retrocomputing enthusiasts will no doubt recognize the floppy disks and circuit boards, identifiable by their unique schematics and labels. By contrast, a modern computer is more ubiquitous and even more powerful, but it’s unlikely to be able to identify what makes the Apple II special… or even what the Apple II is.

That’s a theory I put to the test with CaptionBot, Microsoft’s online tool that accepts image uploads and attempts to describe their contents. Is it a group of people posing for a photo? Someone holding a book? CaptionBot is surprisingly good at recognizing people and their daily activities.

What it’s not so good at is recognizing hardware and software. As a test, I threw at it some photos from the Apple II Enthusiasts group on Facebook and found the results laughably terrible. So for this blog post, I more extensively trolled my KansasFest 2002–2015 photo archives to see what other guesses CaptionBot might get wrong. Here’s what it thought we see and do in Kansas City:

Computers may be able to defeat humans at chess — but we’re still one up on visual recognition. Let’s see what we can capture at KansasFest 2016 to stymy Microsoft’s latest attempt to bring about the singularity.

(Hat tip to Andy Hartup at GamesRadar+ for the inspiration!)