Archive for August, 2019

Bitcoin on the Apple II

August 26th, 2019 11:27 AM
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Every April 1st, Juiced.GS publishes an April Fool’s joke, such as that we’d be encrypting all print issues, or cryogenically freezing our staff. Most readers find it amusing; some find it confusing ("Is this real?"); one found it so offensive that they cancelled their subscription.

To avoid a repeat of any extreme reactions, I aimed for this year’s to be so absurd that no one would ever believe it or feel betrayed by it: Juiced.GS was introducing JuicyBits™, an 8-bit cryptocurrency. How ridiculous! The processing power of the Apple II, while impressive for its time, was nowhere near the minimum to compute modern blockchains. Clearly the impossibility of anyone attempting such a thing made the press release an obvious joke.

Charles Mangin didn’t get the memo.

As detailed in his thorough blog post, Mangin was inspired not by Juiced.GS, but by last month’s KansasFest, to mine Bitcoin on the Apple II for real. With plenty of time on the ride home from Kansas City to theorize his approach, followed by some insightful assistance from Peter Ferrie, it wasn’t long before Mangin had an actual, working algorithm for computing cryptocurrency on his Apple II. Not only that, but he rigged a setup that outputs the computer’s video to Twitch, the popular streaming network, allowing us to watch the computations in real-time.

Watch live video from 8BTC on www.twitch.tv

Don’t sit on the edge of your seat waiting for that magic moment when a Bitcoin is mined, though:

… mining Bitcoin successfully at 3.8 hashes per second will happen, on average, once in 256 trillion years. But it could happen tomorrow. It’s a lottery, after all.

At this point, I’m not sure if the joke is on Charles or on Juiced.GS.

The Oregon Trail Card Game

August 19th, 2019 12:21 PM
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I spend my workdays at Workbar, a co-working space that lets me host a monthly game session. This month, I volunteered my copy of Oregon Trail: The Card Game.

I’d picked up the game from Target when it was released in the summer of 2016, but I never got around to playing it or its expansion pack. Finally, five of us gathered into a covered wagon to collaboratively make our way through a round.

Before departing, I read the enclosed instructions but found them lacking clarity. This complementary video helped clarify a few things.

Then the five of us departed Missouri. We didn’t choose our roles (farmer, banker, carpenter), nor did we elect how to spend our allowance — supply cards were randomly distributed to us.

Four adults playing a card game

An unlikely family of pioneers.

We each had a hand of trail cards that we played to span the distance between the starting card of Independence and the ending card of Willamette Valley. The trail cards fell broadly into three categories: no effect; ford a river; or calamity strikes. The latter two cards occasionally left room for interpretation, which confused our merry band. For example, "Roll an even number to cross the river; roll a 1 and die!" But what about 3 or 5? What I should’ve done before playing was read the Pressman Toys website for "Oregon Trail Rules Updates", whose three bullet points address some of these concerns.

Even with that added knowledge, the game relied mostly on luck of the draw. The rules imply there’s some strategy, such as "Sometimes you may want to let one of your friends die", rather than expend a supply card. But we didn’t encounter such a scenario, nor could I imagine one. Now I understand what Kate Szkotnicki meant when she reviewed this game for Juiced.GS:

Some people may also be put off by the amount of luck the game is based on—players looking for a game where they can finesse the rules, manage their cards and play well against their opponents may be disappointed.

A complete round, including occasional pauses to consult the instructions, took about a half-hour. Now that we better understand how to live and die on the Oregon Trail, I expect future games will be faster, and that the expansion pack might introduce additional options and choices. Still, it’s not a game I recommend rushing to Chimney Rock to buy.

A card saying 'You have died of dysentery.`

A noble (and notorious) death.

Traveling with Agent USA

August 12th, 2019 1:41 PM
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My grade school had an Apple II computer lab filled with educational software from Scholastic. As one of the few students with an Apple II at home, I was allowed to borrow from this collection over the weekends. While issues of Microzine attracted most of my attention, I fondly remember another title: Agent USA, from Tom Snyder Productions.

This game takes the horror of a pandemic (think a cross between Dustin Hoffman’s Outbreak and the Borg) and makes it fun! Players control a government agent (represented as a hat with feet) in a United States whose population is being slowly converted to mindless drones. The only thing that can save them is a self-replicating crystal in the agent’s possession. A single crystal can turn a drone back into a citizen, but a hundred of them can defeat the brains of the operation, the Fuzzbomb. If Agent USA can cultivate the crystals, read the train schedules, buy train tickets, and adjust to time zones, he just might save the day.

Wikipedia says this game teaches "spelling, US geography, time zones, and state capitals", though I’m unsure how much of that I absorbed. For example, with many cities to be explored, capital cities were distinguished by an info booth where players could see projections of the Fuzzbomb’s spread — but I don’t recall memorizing which cities had these maps. Learning how cities connect to each other has transferred to understanding which airlines fly to which cities and where their hubs are, but reading train schedules might’ve proved more useful had I lived in a city that had good public transit.

What I remember most fondly about the game was not the moral lesson my Catholic school wanted me to learn! Trains left the station every thirty seconds, and if you tried to board without a ticket, you’d be summarily ejected. There was little reason to encounter this scenario, since tickets were free (provided you could spell the destination’s name). But if you were strapped not for cash, but for time, you could bypass the ticket booth entirely. Trains would call all-aboard moments before departing, and in that brief window, boarding the train would not leave enough time for the player to be returned to the platform; the train would leave with player in tow.

Having only ever borrowed this game as a kid and wanting it for myself as an adult, I bought a copy of this game five years ago on eBay from Ian Baronofsky, whom I would later meet at KansasFest. I didn’t get around to opening it until just last month. It’s not the clamshell-edition packaging I remember, but inside is the same train-jumping adventure I grew up with.

Feeling Floppy Happy

August 5th, 2019 11:39 AM
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Steve Weyhrich, purveyor of fine Apple II music videos such as "Week of the KFest", "KFest Funk", and "The KFest Show", as well as creator of the Apple II in Minecraft, has done it again. Although he debuted the video "Boot Up and Run" just a month before KansasFest 2019, he followed it up in short order at KansasFest by premiering "Floppy" a parody of "Happy" by Pharrell Williams.

This latest creation already has more views than many of Steve’s previous music videos. I attribute that to two qualities of his song: its source material is well-known; and the video incorporates many members of the Apple II community, lending itself well to being organically shared.

But even without the visual component, it’s still catchy! Using iTube Studio for Mac, I downloaded Steve’s entire playlist in audio format, quickly and easily adding them to my iTunes library.

List of YouTube videos being downloaded as MP3s

If you’ve ever wished your iPhone could play floppy disks, well, now it kind of can.

Siri playing a song in response to being asked to "play floppy"

Thank you for yet another hit, Steve!