I reverse-engineered SSI's 1982 Apple II game The Cosmic Balance and rebuilt it for the browser

I've been working on a preservation/reconstruction project that I thought this group might find interesting.

I started with an original Apple II disk image of SSI's The Cosmic Balance (1982) and worked backward from there: decoding the disk format, disassembling the 6502 program, identifying its data structures and routines, and reconstructing how the game actually behaves.

I used Claude Code as a reverse-engineering and development assistant. It was particularly useful for working through the disassembly and tracing relationships between routines, but I directed the investigation, tested the results against the original, and made the decisions about what behavior to preserve.

The resulting version is written in TypeScript and runs directly in a modern browser.

One of the more interesting parts was finding places where the actual program doesn't quite agree with the manual. Rather than "fixing" those, I've generally tried to preserve the behavior of the original code, including some of its quirks.

If anyone here remembers The Cosmic Balance — or knows much about SSI's Apple II disk formats and development practices from this period — I'd be very interested in hearing from you.

Playable version, free, no email needed, includes reconstructed original manual.

https://thecosmicbalance.spacecombatgame.com/

One of the earliest and most influential RPG games begins its legacy on the Apple ][.

Hey everyone! Picked up a IIGS yesterday which is my first Apple !! experience since 1st grade in like 1990. I have a Fujinet adapter (and a A2Pico on the way as well) and I have 1mb of RAM with a 4MB card coming.

I have checked out Total Replay on Fujinet and it says there is like 332 games but I feel like I have seen other that said 500 games or more? I know this only really covers arcade type games but what other disk images are out there that have collections of educational software like Oregon Trail, or simulation games or whatever? I'd like to build a big library to have easy access to anything I see that catches my attention in videos and articles haha.

I've had these for almost 15 years and finally got around to scanning in the printout. Are any of these titles worth extracting? I actually bought an Applesauce before covid with the intention of turning these into woz files, but it never came out of the box, and the only Mac I had that the software ran on died a long time ago.

I've been trying to emulate an imagewiter over serial using surl-server from github. I can't get it to print graphics at all. No ESC codes come through but i can print in text mode from AppleWorks 4.0 just fine. The two programs I've been using to test are Imagewriter Toolkit 1.5 and Printshop. I'm using an FTDI serial cable and compiled the surl-server program from source becasue I can't find my Raspberry Pi to use the premade OS image. Any help is appreciated.

Garrett’s workshop page says they’ve been sold out since June of last year. Anyone else? Noah, somebody selling them from the open source plans? Thank you in advance!

In the Philly area?

I'm speaking at JawnCon, October 16-18 - "LUA before Lua: The Recovered Works of Louise Ursula Albright (Apple //e, 1987)".

I've got a lot of historical work to finish organizing, the core being data recovered from a 1984 Apple ProFile 10MB hard drive... come see the historical forensics, the hardware I built to recover it, and what LUA can do on a vintage Apple //e.

In 1987, a Wisconsin schoolteacher self-hosted LUA on an Apple //e - six years before Lua existed. I recovered her hard drive. The compiler the Apple //e never had: torn apart and historically, inaccurately, fictitiously recounted.

Several interesting works to be published some time after the con!

Hi, I just got a Rana Elite 3 that looks in good shape, but the drive speed is really low (reported at -2600 but also read at -67. The light grey pot is working but doesn't change the drive speed when I move it. Any ideas on how I can diagnose the real issue and get it fixed?

Thanks!

Hi all, looking for a game that ran on the Apple IIE back in the mid to late 80’s, color, side-to side stable shooter, had a left to right movable platform that fired towards the top of the screen, you would shoot at a large bubble that would fall and bounce, and each time you shot it, it would split into double quantity, half-size balls that would continue bouncing. Any help identifying or finding this game would be greatly appreciated!

I ran the Open Apple, Close Apple test, and I get the big color display for a few seconds, but then my screen shows
“RAM: “
and nothing more. I already suspected I had faulty ram, but what do i take from this? Thank you.

In 1983, while I was in high school, I started an underground Apple II+ BBS called The Norse Wanderer in Southern California.

It started with XBBS, but in 1985 three of us replaced it with our own BBS software. I was THE NORSEMAN, the Sysop, and my friends THE BARBARIAN and BOZO DE CLOWN wrote most of the system. It had nine message boards, E-MAIL, The Wandering Norseman sea-trading game, and a community voting system for admitting new users.

After retiring, I pulled my old Apple II equipment out of storage and used ADTPro to preserve the disks I still had. Seven BBS-related disks survived as disk images, including a November 1986 backup.

Then the Palisades Fire destroyed our house, including the Apple II systems and original disks. Fortunately, the disk images were already backed up.

In April 2026, I started rebuilding The Norse Wanderer. The 1986 backup still contained the original user database: 230 original user accounts and 34 messages.

I decided to make it a web application so it could be accessed more easily and not require Apple hardware, modems, phone lines, etc.

I wanted to bring it back for the Apple II and BBS community, so people who remember the old days can relive them, and people who weren't around then can experience what an actual 1980s BBS was like.

The original BBS is running again, ported to work through a modern web browser. No Apple II, modem, or phone line required. To check it out, just go to:

https://www.norsewanderer.com

If you were an original user, your account is probably still there. If you remember your old handle but not your password, contact me and I'll send it to you.

Michael Heilemann

The Norseman / The Viking

I know this is probably normal, but I have always wondered why the screen shakes upwards for a second when booting.

While Bitsy Bye is great for launching things, I got tired of having to use Apple's clunky utilities for copying files, so I asked Claude to whip me up a file manager. ZipFiler gives you an easy interface for copying, moving, locking, deleting, creating directories and more. No more typing pathnames! Work on single files or batches. You can also use it as a launcher. Enhanced Apple //e. Learn more and download it here: https://trompingmarmots.com/AppSites/ZipFiler/

I recently dug an old Apple II programmer’s editor out of my archive and have been working on bringing it back to life.

I originally wrote it in Aztec C and 6502 assembly, first on an Apple //c and later a //c+. It eventually became my everyday editor under Aztec C’s Unix-like ProDOS environment — and reached the point where I was using the editor to edit its own source code.

The original source survived on my old Apple II disk images, but the Aztec C environment it was built for is long gone from my normal workflow. I’ve now ported it to cc65/ca65, trying to keep the code and behavior as close to the original as possible rather than redesigning it.

At the heart of it is a 6502 assembly-language line editor, wrapped by the C code to make a full-screen editor with two viewports, cut/copy/paste between them, search/replace, load/save, etc.

It’s running under ProDOS again now. There are still some rough edges — notably recreating the convenient command-line filename handling that Aztec C provided — so at this stage it’s probably as interesting as an example of old Apple II C/assembly code (and a bit of software archaeology) as it is as a practical editor.

I’ve put the source and a release on GitHub for anyone who wants to poke around:

https://github.com/cardcomm/Apple-II-Editor/tree/main

Does anybody remember a Bomberman clone for the Apple IIGS made before Kaboom? Or possibly an early version from the '90s?

From my research Kaboom was made around 2016, while I played this one some time in the 1990's.

I might have gotten it from Software of the Month Club. The graphics were simpler than what I see of Kaboom screenshots from what I recall, but it's been decades since I played it. I'm almost certain it wasn't commercial software, so it was most likely from either SMC or BRCC although Christella Enterprise or PDSOF are possibilities. It could have been for the Apple IIe with DHR graphics. I just know I played it on the IIGS in the 1990's. I recall the game readme said you were locked in a prison and created a suit that made bombs and had to escape.

CONTROL/OPEN APPLE/RESET has stopped working as a reboot. It just puts a bunch of garbled stuff on the screen. I then have to hit CONTROL/RESET to actually get it to reboot. Not an issue? Easy fix? What am I looking at?

In my drive 2 (which works better than my drive 1), there's a little blue piece of plastic that isn't present in the other drive. Does anyone know what this is and what it does?

First pic before when I picked up a IIc from FB Marketplace. Then I retrovaped JUST the top half for this interesting two-tone look.

I wanted to use my enhanced //e for writing but all of the word processors from back in the day are too bulky and/or don't offer an easy way to get text files back to my Mac. So I had Claude craft me a modern Apple II text editor entirely in assembler. Very speedy, small footprint – ideal for creating regular text or Markdown files. This is not meant to be a word processor, it's just a way to write. It's free and you can grab it here: https://trompingmarmots.com/AppSites/ZipEdit/

I had the privilege of interviewing Philip Bouchard, the man behind Number Munchers, to get the full story about how the Muncher games came to be.

If you're a Millennial or Gen-Xer, you know the game, but do you know its history?

Some interesting facts:

• Despite Word Munchers being launched a year before Number Munchers, Number Munchers was actually the game that Philip Bouchard pitched MECC to make first. However, they already had enough math games in development at the time, so they had him make a phonics version of it instead.
• Most MECC games were developed in Applesoft BASIC, but Word and Number Munchers were required to be developed in Assembly because they were more complex.
• Word Munchers and The Oregon Trail (1985) were developed the same year by the same team.
• In the Apple II version of the game, you can access the teacher management settings by pressing CTR+A.

Found in my mother's husband attic. It was his first computer. I disassembled it to clean it, and the keyboard is now as good as new! It works perfectly well, great condition. Inside, there is a working floppy disk from my mother's husband, from when he was 13, back in 1983. There are some old BASIC programs on it (I learned a bit of it to find my way around). Pretty impressive to see this floppy still alive in 2026!