Apple II Bits

In January of last year, Darren Gladstone posted a blog to PCWorld.com entitled “Classic Apple II Games That Inspired Today’s Greats“, though it wasn’t until three months later that I found it. Wanting to spread the word of the Apple II’s influence, and under the content-sharing agreement between PCWorld and my own employer, I reposted the blog to Computerworld.com. For some reason, that republication got noticed more than the original, and sites like Virtual Apple experienced a noticeable increase in traffic.

That same blog post got me thinking not just about classic Apple II games, but also their modern analogues on the Mac or online. I started drawing mental comparisons, similar to the Life & Death / Trauma Center similarities I’ve already outlined here. As the list grew, I decided to present my findings at KansasFest 2009. To streamline the presentation by remaining within a single operating system, I downloaded YouTube videos demonstrating the gameplay of Apple II classics and had their Mac or online equivalents ready to show. I didn’t have time to make all the comparisons I’d prepared, but here are those that were showcased:

Apple II	Equivalent	Mac	iOS	Flash
Montezuma's Revenge	Midnight Mansion	✓
Conan: Hall of Volta	Midnight Mansion	✓
Robotron	Grid Wars	✓
Lode Runner	Android	✓	✓	✓
Qix	l1neum	✓
Choplifter	Chopper	✓	✓
Solstice	Alien8	✓
Shadowgate	Malstrum's Mansion			✓
Oregon Trail	Thule Road Trip			✓

Click on the checkmark in the appropriate column above to find that version of the game. Note that Grid Wars is listed but no longer available from its official source due to a potential copyright infringement with the popular video game Geometry Wars. Grid Wars’ Wikipedia entry suggests alternatives.

I’ve compiled a YouTube playlist demonstrating the gameplay of the above Apple II games:

The session was better received than I anticipated. I didn’t think anyone would enjoy watching me play games, but the trip down memory lane paired with modern gaming somehow seemed to resonate. In hindsight, the only game I should not have included was Solstice, as it turned out to be for the Nintendo only and was never released for the Apple II — no wonder my audience didn’t recognize it!

The positive feedback from my 2009 session has motivated me to revisit the topic later this month at KansasFest 2010. I have nearly a dozen more games to compare and contrast, but I welcome your suggestions. What Apple II entertainment software would you like to find an equivalent for on a modern platform?

It seems almost every time Apple is due to refresh their product line, the Mac mini is rumored to get the axe. But this model, the most affordable (though perhaps underpowered) of all Macs, is an excellent low-end product that most people overlook. For consumers switching from a PC who already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, the Mac mini is the best value. Three years ago, I replaced my father’s beige PowerMac G3 with a Mac mini. After I upgraded the RAM, he couldn’t have been more satisfied with his first OS X machine, which serves him well to this day.

But an average Apple II user might find the Mac mini underwhelming, as we like to trick out our rigs, and the mini, with its compact size and modest horsepower, doesn’t afford much opportunity to do that. So if we can’t go forward with the Mac mini, why not go backward?

Dr. Steve Weyhrich of Apple2History.org posted to csa2 the story of Charles Mangin, who has taken his Mac mini and encased it in a Disk II floppy drive, which was popular with the Apple II. Like the TARDIS, the Disk II must be larger on the inside than it appears!

Copyright Charles Mangin

This same gentleman made a similar internal upgrade when he put a G4 Macintosh into an original Mac Plus. I wonder what he does with the discarded guts?

(Hat tips to Gizmodo and Blake Patterson)