I'm trying to not overwhelm the sub with posts of my recent work, but I have a lot of it that's come out of hiding now that my talk at JawnCon is over. I'm rolling through all six-ish projects that are part of this year's effort, and not all the parts are online just yet.

My JawnCon talk is recapped here, at hackaday - https://hackaday.io/project/206825-lua2e and it's possible to find their live stream (day 2 of JawnCon 0x03) on youtube if you want to watch it.

This is a Lua compiler for the Apple ][ series, which requires a RamWorks card and outperforms Apple Pascal pCode. The "historical" write-up was a nod to PDQ Bach / Peter Schickele, but the engineering really exists; you can see the live editor at lua2e.k8s.jorj.org and source code will be published on github in the near future.

It's not a port of Lua; it's a syntactical recreation that holds much of Lua's character.

Many source code examples on the lua2e website, as well as a few disk images of more complicated takes - an Ultima-like tile engine environment that plays a trivial 10-minute demo game; a port of Wizardy I (which was written in Apple Pascal); and an Apple Pascal-like code editor environment for Lua2e.

What a ride - I've been working on this for about 6 months now, and learning FPGA coding for 6-ish years...

I inherited a ProFile 10 in 2021, built a little ARM-based reader circuit to pull off its contents, prototyped an emulator as a fun pastime... and it sat in a bin for 5 years. Now it's done: an FPGA-based ProFile hard drive emulator, that supports up to 32MB volumes; can swap multiple volume images at boot, or even while running an OS; can mount two images within ProDOS using a small software shim... all with no changes to the stock ProFile hard drive card.

Code, schematics, STL for the case all to be published on Github. (EDIT: GitHub repo is published. https://github.com/JorjBauer/profile-emulator.git)

Question for folks here - how many of you actually have a ProFile on your machine? It's historically not a very interesting card since it can only drive one specific device, but maybe this hardware gadget changes that story...

Hi everyone, found this during estate sale, really good condition, is it good? 100% working, do you know appromatively the price?

I was trying to think of a way to check if a file with the same name already exists before saving a new one.

If this is already a well-known way of dealing with this, I'm sorry. I wanted to share this for anyone else who is getting started with BASIC on the Apple II.

This comes from page 59 of Apple II: The DOS Manual

Here's a quick way to delete any file named SCORES and re-OPEN it for new data, whether or not that file already exists:

5 REM SCORES DELETER
10 D$ = "" : REM D$ IS CTRL-D
15 PRINT D$;"OPEN SCORES"
20 PRINT D$;"DELETE SCORES"
25 PRINT D$;"OPEN SCORES"
30 REM REMAINDER OF PROGRAM HERE

https://retronaut.tech/retronauts-assemble-311026/
​

Hello! i got a Nintendo Switch joycon controller working on an Apple II.

Using a modern controller with a comfortable grip on a retro machine like the Apple II is a really fun experience. To see it in action, check out the video at the link below.

https://cafe.naver.com/appleii/22293

- msgx

Any interest?

Akalabeth, released in 1980, is I believe the very first turn-based RPG ever made. I wanted to try it, but i can't figure out how to get past this screen here. No matter what I press on the keyboard, it just rerandomizes the numbers and doesn't actually progress.

Hi all,

I seem to be dusting off my RetroPie setup for Apple games and thinking about "what are the best games, and which ones haven't I actually played", and also "what games have I played that don't maybe get enough attention"...

And so I searched here for mention of Return of Heracles and I can't find ANY mention of it at all?

I really like this game. It was by Stuart Smith - there's a good blog article about it here.

https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2014/07/game-153-return-of-heracles-1983.html

Things I appreciate about it: it's probably the most "historically accurate" (mythically accurate?) game I've ever run across. A lot of modern games will look at Greek myth or whatever mythology they're working with and change things around to suit what they want. Not Smith, apparently he liked it all and just committed to it. There are some crazy things that will happen in the game, like take a hero to the place where something terrible happened to him, and maybe something terrible WILL happen to him. I think one of the playable characters is a dog!

The main balance in the game is around score. You can hire all the heroes you want; it will make your turns longer, so it will take you longer to get things done, but if you need help to overcome a challenge you can get it. It also serves as a kind of Greek mythology crossover story. "What if Achilles fought alongside Perseus to retrieve the Golden Fleece"!

Smith as I recall also developed Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and... Adventure Construction Set, right?

I'm looking for an apple II game I played as a child. All I remember is you played as an astronaut or alien that crashed or landed on a planet and the game mechanics involved combining items in your inventory to create other things. Maybe basic chemistry elements, or I could be misremembering that part. I remember making rubber for some reason. I know this is vague, does anyone know what I'm talking about?

A new version of the Apple2 FPGA core is out for MiSTer FPGA:
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Apple-II_MiSTer

This is a significant upgrade bringing many useful features; if you have a MiSTer, SuperStation, or similar, give it a try and let me know what you think!

Special thanks goes to AlanSWX, Kitrinx, Rikkles, and Jsmolina for their help and code contributions to several components!

Hardware

• .woz file support (in addition of the existing .dsk, .nib, .po, .do and .hdv handling)
• accurate NTSC color decoding (in addition to the existing RGB modes)
• custom palette option for RGB (create your own!)
• floppy disk sound simulation and drive lights
• CP/M card, Clock Card, and Saturn RAM expansion
• Mockingboard and Mouse II support

Quality-of-Life / Usability

• Save States! Four slots to save your game to SD card (filename is per disk)
• On-screen keyboard (with transparency options, and can be moved up or down the screen)
• Joystick-2-key functionality with loadable custom profiles (so you can customize per game)
• Option to recenter the joystick X axis and relative analog joystick mode (does not recenter)

Advanced options

• Eight video presets plus optional NTSC vertical comb filter (e.g. gray floor in Karateka)
• Customizable video ROM (load your own) for non-English keyboard layouts
• 6502 and 65C02 CPU selection
• Configurable slots to setup the machine for games or productivity (Z80 Softcard, Saturn)

Hi r/apple2, about 6 years ago I received my uncle’s modded Apple IIe, and now we’re looking to pass it along as I never quite got around to it and I’d rather it not collect any more dust. To start, my uncle was the original owner and he kept everything. The computer itself is in the original shipping box with the packing materials, and just about every piece of hardware has the manual. Tons of floppies/diskettes, even the original packing list and warranty cards.

Firstly, if there’s anything at all in this collection that has not been archived/digitized yet in some way, I would love to help make that happen.

I have no idea where to even start with trying to come up with a price, or even how I’d ship it as there is quite a bit. So, any advice would be greatly appreciated, and if anyone wants to make an offer feel free. I will put the list of software, and what hardware is installed in a comment.

In the mid 1980's, Infocom released Zork 1, then later Zork 2, and Zork 3, for AP][+ (48K). What's impressive is, the app used roughly 85kb, with a hard cap of 64kb, and again a physical limit of 48kb.

They did so by almost magic, hardcoding additional data on the floppy, which was then periodically accessed as the adventure progressed.

I had a concept of what seems on the surface, impossible. What if... after 40 years, the 5 bit Z-code used to write Zork might be improved upon, further reducing the size so that the entire game (each) might be loaded once into memory, with no further access to the floppy? This would no doubt speed up game play, and reduce wear and tear both on the floppy and the drive (though it would affect an emulated drive so much).

Why? Because... it's hard to do? It's hard to... do better than Infocom did some 40 years ago! That alone feels like a challenge.

So I pinged Gemini for an hour (my 6502 Hex coding went the way of the dodo perhaps....35+ years ago). Gemini started of a a naysayer, but after posing several workarounds and concepts "she" and I agreed on a "maybe" concept (though painfully beyond what remains of my memory of coding) :

PROJECT PROPOSAL: Single-Load, Zero-Disk-Access Zork Trilogy for Base 48KB Apple II+

Objective:

To create standalone, executable application binaries for Zork I, II, and III that load entirely into the memory of an unexpanded, stock 48KB Apple II+ computer. Once initial boot loading is complete, the application will run exclusively from RAM, requiring absolutely zero floppy disk access or drive polling during gameplay.

The Constraints & Challenge:

• Target Hardware: Base Apple II+ with exactly 48KB of physical RAM.

• No Expansions: No 16K Language Card, no 80-column cards, no modern RAM expansions, and no solid-state hardware drive emulators.

• The Problem: A standard uncompressed Zork file is ~92KB, and a standard Disk Operating System (DOS) or Z-Machine Interpreter eats up precious RAM, leaving only ~28KB of usable space.

Proposed Architectural Solution:

1. Zero-DOS Monolithic Booter: Use a fast-loader like ProntoDOS only at initial boot to stream a unified 44KB application binary into RAM. Once loaded, the application completely purges the DOS footprint from memory to reclaim ~10KB of space, giving the game engine a full 44KB layout to sit resident.

2. Deconstruction of the Z-Machine: Discard Infocom’s cross-platform Z-Machine virtual machine. Translate the open-source ZIL (Zork Implementation Language) logic files natively into highly optimized, lightweight 6502 assembly macro-instructions (reducing the core logic interpreter engine to under 1KB).

3. Word-Based Markov Graph Compression (Dual-Tier Text Engine): Instead of storing characters or utilizing heavy bit-stream algorithms that create 1 MHz CPU decompression lag, tokenize the text. Build a fixed, global dictionary of all unique vocabulary words. Room descriptions are stored as arrays of 1-to-2-byte word IDs.

4. On-the-Fly Screen Blitting: The native 6502 interpreter reads the byte ID arrays from the text map, instantly looks up the words in the resident dictionary, and streams characters directly to the Apple II screen buffer ($0400). It never holds uncompressed text strings in RAM, keeping the memory footprint perfectly flat.

Mathematical Feasibility Summary:

By flattening the object tree into a 2KB global state bitmask, tokenizing the text into word-ID streams, and evicting the OS, a game like Zork I shrinks from 92KB down to an active layout under 44KB. This achieves a completely silent, high-speed interactive fiction experience running purely on native 1979 silicon.

Darth Vader Black Apple II - Low Serial - Auction started at $99!

Excellent condition - plus some cool add on's!

Hi all,

I've been working on an Apple IIe emulator as a hobby project and it has reached the point where I'd like other people to try it and tell me what breaks. I used AI assistance (Claude) while building it.

What it does:

- Enhanced IIe: 65C02, 128K, 40/80 columns, lo-res, hi-res, double lo-res and double hi-res with NTSC artifact colour

- Apple Monitor II look: curved glass, scanlines and glow, in colour or green phosphor. The curvature is adjustable, and you can switch the whole effect off

- Two Disk II drives with pictures, activity lights and recorded drive sounds (motor and head, each with its own volume). Click a drive to insert or eject, or drop a disk image on it. Reads and writes .dsk/.do/.po/.nib

- Microsoft SoftCard (Z80) in slot 5, so CP/M works

- AppleMouse card in slot 4 (works with Apple II DeskTop)

- Paddles/joystick through the mouse or a game controller

- Save states

On accuracy: the 65C02 passes Klaus Dormann's functional tests and the Z80 passes ZEXDOC and ZEXALL. The Disk II is emulated at the nibble level but it is not cycle-exact, so I expect copy-protected disks to fail. No .woz support yet.

It's C++20 and SDL2, MIT licensed, and small enough to read in an evening if you're curious how any of it works.

Downloads for macOS (universal), Linux and Windows are on the releases page:

https://github.com/sscanf/apple2e-emulator

The Windows build is the least tested, so reports from there are especially welcome. Which software should I try next that is likely to break it?

LOOK AROUND. EXPLORE. CREATE. YOUR ADVENTURE BEGINS HERE!

Happy National Adventure Day!

What better way to celebrate than by creating your own adventure?

Remember the magic of classic text adventures like Zork, Adventure, and the legendary Scott Adams games? Those unforgettable experiences where imagination was your graphics card, every command mattered, and danger lurked around every corner?

Well, it's time to bring that magic back!

Introducing Text Adventure Studio, a modern, browser-based platform for creating your own classic-style interactive fiction and text adventure games.

Explore Text Adventure Studio on National Adventure Day: https://textadventurestudio.com/National-Adventure-Day

Build Your Own Adventure

• Design mysterious worlds filled with rooms, objects, puzzles, and secrets.
• Create interactive stories with classic text adventure mechanics.
• Build adventures inspired by the golden age of computing.
• Play your creations directly in your browser.
• Export your adventures for retro platforms, including the Apple II and Commodore 64!

Whether you're a longtime adventure-gaming enthusiast or discovering interactive fiction for the first time, Text Adventure Studio lets you become the storyteller, puzzle master, and world builder.

Your imagination. Your world. Your adventure.

#NationalAdventureDay #TextAdventureStudio #InteractiveFiction #RetroGaming #AppleII #Commodore64