Apple II History
The story of "the MOST personal computer"!
KansasFest 2016
It has been a long time since I made a post here (hello, August 2015!!), but life has been busy, and I have other things that draw my attention besides my old stalwart Apple II fun.
What brings me back to the blog again to mention the annual Apple II convention, KansasFest, which was held July 19-23, 2016, in Kansas City, Missouri at Rockhurst University. It was, I feel, another excellent gathering of the best and brightest in the Apple II world, and shows continued growth of the numbers of fans who find out what fun it is to get together with others who love this computer, to teach each other and learn from each other, and to press back the frontiers of what this old machine can do. While the following is not comprehensive, here are some things that stood out to me:
- We were treated to updates to Lawless Legends, the new graphic role-playing game undergoing development, and a release of a smaller game, Ancient Legends, that runs using the same game engine as Lawless Legends (see the Legends web site for details on how to get that).
- PERCOL-8, a networkable Apple II emulator that not only runs old Apple II software, but uses special graphics software to manipulate the old screens to you can get a 3D type of effect, or even have two different people help play the same game at the same time.
- How the Internet Archive is making it even easier to run old Apple II software right in your web browser.
- How Apple II software deprotector 4am (a great contributor to the Internet Archive collection) came up with a program to allow you to automatically remove copy protection from most old software (if you have any old uncopyable disks).
- More and more about emulators than I’ve heard at KFest for years
and much more than I have time to discuss here. You can look for videos of many of the sessions on YouTube; here is the talk I gave about the history of online services here:
We had the privilege of a visit this year by David Pierini of Cult of Mac, who wrote five stories about the event:
- Apple II fans find themselves in hog heaven at KansasFest
- This guy makes badly aged Apple computers sparkle again
- KansasFest solder session proves there’s fun in melting metal
- KansasFest is a second-chance childhood for one programmer
- KansasFest: Final notes from ‘Nerdvana’
And I was able to complete another parody video about the event, this year with lots of video from the event:
Not only this, but we will be having it again next year, July 18-23, 2017. Come next year, and celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apple II !
Werkelijk een perfecte samenwerking van 35 jaar als Apple dealer erg onberekenbaar waren sommige dealers die dan ook heel snel failliet gingen. Het product is en was altijd uitstekend en de service ook maar veel domme dingen deden ze. Je zag de coca cola boer als directeur, nu nog heb je veel van dit soort mislukte hoog opgeleide niksnutten in de maatschappij zie ook het makkelijk en veel kunnen stelen van geld ook door veel bankmedewerkers en natuurlijk door slecht werkende systemen. Geef mij maar Apple en je bedrijf draait er wel bij.