Apple II Bits

Apple II user Rino Mardo recently shared on Facebook a scene from one of my all-time favorite movies, The Terminator. This 1984 classic with Arnold Schwarzenegger stars a T-800 Model 101 cybernetic organism sent from the future to assassinate Sarah Connor. Despite a nuclear holocaust and the rise of sentient artificial intelligence, Skynet, the computer that created the T-800, still relied on proven, pre-apocalyptic technology to design its chrono-displaced robot: its CPU is a 6502, running assembly programming published in Nibble Magazine.

This Easter Egg isn’t news: it was already well-known by the Apple II community even before Nibble founding editor David Szetela mentioned it during his KansasFest 2007 keynote speech. I then wrote about it a few months later in a blog post for Computerworld, a job I started just a few months before Szetela’s speech.

The Terminator is one of only many movies that the Apple II has graced with an appearance. Starring the Computer, James Carter’s impressive database of computers in movies, lists every Apple II model and the movies and television shows in which is featured. It includes such notable titles as TRON (which turned 34 this month), Hackers (reviewed in Juiced.GS in June 2006), Explorers, Kindergarten Cop, and Lost.

Although that filmography extends to films as recent as Iron Man, the Apple II’s modern cinematic career is mostly limited to historical coverage — such as Welcome to Macintosh, the 2008 documentary reviewed in Juiced.GS and now available to view in full for free online.

What are some of your favorite Apple II cameos on the silver screen?

KansasFest 2016 is less than a month away, which means I have some preparation to do. Besides being the biggest one-day sales event for Juiced.GS, it’s also an opportunity to learn from some of the best and brightest minds and innovators in the Apple II community. I like to fool myself into believing I belong among such an echelon by submitting a session: it gives me something to do, look forward to, and contribute throughout the week of KansasFest. But what to present?

This year I took Andy Molloy’s advice and settled on a follow-up to sessions I gave in 2009 and 2010: Classic gaming inspirations and classic gaming inspirations, part deux. For old-school gamers, I demonstrated some modern games that are spiritually inspired by our favorite Apple II classics. It’s been six years, during which time Steam and Kickstarter have hid their stride, resulting in an abundance of low-budget, high-quality indie games — just like we used to have in the day. So for this year’s session, I’m limiting my selections exclusively to Steam:

Steam is the largest online marketplace for PC, Mac, and Linux games, making it easy for independent game developers to distribute their software. But indie game developers often lack the resources of major game studios. What they lack in funding, they make up for in creativity, turning to classic games and genres for inspiration. We’ll look at many Steam titles where the Apple II influence is strong, suggesting modern games that will appeal to classic gamers.

I’m looking forward to plumbing the roster of games I’ve featured on the IndieSider podcast and possibly discovering some new ones in the course of my research. Any assistance you can provide would be most welcome! What classic games did you enjoy that you’d like to see modern counterparts to — or what modern games have you played that reminded you of classic games?

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!)

When I attended my first KansasFest in 1998, fellow attendee and Kansas resident Sean Fahey invited us to his nearby home, where we were welcome to any of the Apple II hardware and software he had amassed there. We were doing him a favor by helping clean out his garage.

But no matter how hard we tried, Sean’s collection grew; for every floppy drive someone left with, two took its place. Sean suffers from the same problem I do: the pain of seeing perfectly good equipment being thrown away just because the owner didn’t know of or couldn’t look for a better home. Sean altruistically saved many such lots from the garbage, storing it in the short term so that he might find a home for it in the long term.

The collection grew to the point that salvaging equipment, storing it between KansasFests, and transporting it to Rockhurst became expensive. The handful of Apple II users who had the privilege of attending KansasFest contributed to defray the costs, but that wasn’t enough — Sean and cohorts such as James Littlejohn were still saddled with the majority of the expenses.

But the value of Sean’s service extends beyond KansasFest, and Sean has graciously given the wider community the opportunity to contribute by creating a GoFundMe campaign. Unlike Kickstarter, GoFundMe has no limits or deadlines, allowing its organizers to benefit from any and all fundraising. Any amount is appreciated — up to, including, and past the goal of $3,500. In the first four days, the crowdfunding campaign had already reached 55% of its goal. (Full disclosure: Juiced.GS contributed $100.)

No new Apple II computers are being made, so it behooves us to save the ones we have — not just as historical artifacts, but as living entities for us to continue using and enjoying. Every computer Sean saves is one that may end up in the hands of a teacher, programmer, or hacker who could help create the next great Apple II user, emulator, or expansion. My thanks to the organizers of Sean’s Garage Giveaway, and to everyone who’s now ensuring it continues well into the future.

UPDATE (Oct 8, 2015): Thank you to everyone who helped put this campaign over its goal! Sean Fahey wrote on Facebook:

I want to thank everyone for their generosity. I hope the next 3 Garage Giveaways are worthy of the trust and investment you’ve placed in us. We’ve got enough to cover the next 2 years of storage ($2000+) and to also cover the expenses for an upcoming trip to Florida to acquire a large collection. We’re flying down, renting a truck and driving it back — that trips budget is approximately $1350 for James Littlejohn and myself. It covers plane tickets, truck rental, gas, hotel and meals. Javier A. Rivera is planning to come up and help us with the loading. We may kidnap him and bring him back for the unloading part, but he’s really fast on his feet and hard to catch. Again, a heartfelt thanks to my friends in the Apple II and KansasFest communities for your help. Apple II Forever!

Last week I attended the 27th (and my 18th) annual KansasFest, a convention for Apple II users. I was thrilled to be among fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts, charging my batteries for another year of Juiced.GS and other hobby projects.

As an educator and public speaker, I love giving presentations at KansasFest. Most of the event’s talks are technical in nature, whereas I tend to take what I’ve learned in the other areas of my life — podcasting, crowdfunding — and apply them to the Apple II. This year, I drew upon my experience developing a YouTube channel and demonstrated how to record a Let’s Play video using the Elgato Game Capture HD hardware (but not the more expensive HD60, which lacks the necessary A/V input port).

This $150 device is normally used to capture HDMI audio and video, but with an included adapter, it can capture component video as well. By plugging the red component cable into an Apple II’s composite video output, and then connecting the computer’s headphone jack to a 3.5mm-to-RCA adapter, the audio and video from an Apple II will show up oon a PC or Mac in the Elgato’s software — but with a delay. A monitor stills need to be connected to the Apple II, which is why I used Chris Torrence’s Night Owl monitor plugged into the IIc’s video port; an RGB monitor connected to a IIGS will work as well. Then I used a 3.5mm Y-splitter to connect headphones or speakers to the Apple II. (Note that the IIc Plus does not have a headphone jack; neither does the IIe, unless you add a RetroConnector adapter.) Finally, a USB headset allowed me to overlay my audio commentary over the recorded gameplay footage.

Prefer to learn these techniques visually? Mike Whalen streamed my KansasFest session and has made it available on YouTube:

Here’s the Let’s Play Flapple Bird video that I recorded during this session.

The capture process was not perfect, as I had to make two edits in Final Cut Pro X before uploading to YouTube: the height of Elgato’s exported video was stretched (654 x 480), so I reduced the Y-scale to 85% (though ultimately I went with an X-scale of 147.79% and Y-scale of 125.62%, so as to occupy the full window); and the color was off, so I adjusted it per this screenshot.

Editing Flapple Bird in Final Cut Pro X.
I saved this setting as an "Apple II" preset.

Also, I should’ve disabled the KansasFest sound system, as I was close enough to the speaker for my USB headset to pick up my booming voice, resulting in poor audio quality.

Although my session focused primarily on Let’s Play videos, I also gave a brief introduction to unboxing videos, the genre with which I launched my YouTube channel. I combined unboxing Let’s Play, and the Apple II when I unboxed and played Retro Fever.

Not sure why anyone would watch someone else play a video game — or what my "I moth stories" shirt meant? Both are explained in this video from a monthly storyslam I attend in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I hope this session was useful and that it inspired attendees to record and share their subjective experience with Apple II software. I look forward to your YouTube videos!

Today is the eve of KansasFest 2015, the annual gathering of Apple II enthusiasts in Kansas City, Missouri. This year’s event marks a milestone: it’s the first to feature a keynote speaker from the LGBT community and a code of conduct, and it marks half my life I’ve been attending KansasFest.

It’s the attendees that make KansasFest such an exuberant event, and one of the people I most look forward to seeing is Steve Weyhrich. Author of the definitive history of the Apple II, Sophistication & Simplicity, Steve is also a KansasFest committee member who puts plenty of time and energy into making the event as fun and zany as possible. One year he did so by filming a series of on-site vignettes that he, parodying the role of CSI‘s David Caruso character, investigated, concluding with a series of silly zingers.

This year’s addition to Steve’s video repertoire is no less ridiculous. I’m not cool enough to be familiar with the song "Uptown Funk" by Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson — I was only the 789,569,005th person to discover it since its YouTube debut this past November. Steve, being the hip daddy-o he is, took that hit song and adapted it to be about KansasFest. Introducing the music video "KFest Funk":

My thanks to Steve, the committee, and all the attendees for making every KansasFest unique, special, and fun. I can’t wait to see you all tomorrow!