Category: News

Would you like to try a game or utility available here before bothering to download it? Perhaps you don’t have access to real Apple II hardware and you don’t want to setup an Apple II emulator. If so, there is a solution.

Chris Torrence’s Apple2TS is a very full featured emulator for 8-bit Apple II’s which you can run right from your modern web browser. I have added links from the following pages which will load the respective application into the Apple2TS emulator:

• Apple2048
• A2Sudoku
• Apple II Bejeweled
• ColourGo
• Eight Bit Blast
• CurtaSim

So, if you would like to try some of these applications and haven’t had the means in the past, perhaps this will help.

During the development of BuGS, I leaned heavily on members of the Apple II community on slack. I decided to post weekly updates on progress towards building a game for the IIgs throughout the development progress. These posts often featured videos of the latest build.

I have decided to go back to the slack archives and extract those posts and make them available here. You can find them on the BuGS Development page. Also included with each post is a link to the GitHub repository so you can browse the code as it existed at the time. And there is a link to the set of changes since the last update. This allows you to quickly see the changes that I made at each stage of development.

I hope people find this bit of history interesting. And thanks to the Apple II community on slack who were always encouraging and provided so much expertise that got me past so many tricky problems.

Rand-Emonium has released version 1.0 of Wordle Solver for the Apple IIGS. Wordle is the puzzle game where you try to guess the five letter word and based on feedback on what letters are correct, you work towards finding the target word. Wordle Solver is a classic desk accessory that will solve the puzzle for you. It will tell you what word to guess. Then, you tell it which letters are right and wrong and it will then give you a better guess.

Wordle Solver was created during KansasFest 2022, a yearly conference celebrating the Apple II.

More information about Wordle Solver.

Rand-Emonium has updated the online high score website for the BuGS video game for the Apple IIGS. For players who have network connectivity in their Apple IIGS, the game will submit their high scores to the website. Previously, the website just listed the top scores.

With the updates, the top scores are still available but alongside that, there is now a leaderboard view. The top scores from each player are ranked so it is easy to see at a glance who is leading and who is challenging. And in both lists, each player has a link to a page with stats about that player. There, you can see their position on the high score list, on the leaderboard, their best, worst and average score and more.

Also, the infrastructure has been updated to support multiple games. Today, BuGS is the only game which is submitting scores but perhaps it will be possible to add this functionality to other GS titles.

Visit scores.rand-emonium.com to see the high scores and play BuGS to submit your own scores, aiming for the top spot.

Rand-Emonium has released version 1.0 of ListenerGS. ListenerGS allows you to use a modern iOS, iPadOS or macOS device with your network capable Apple IIGS and perform speech to text within desktop applications on your GS. As you speak to the modern device, keystrokes are generated on the GS to insert the corresponding text. This video shows ListenerGS in action:

ListenerGS was my KansasFest 2021 HackFest entry. In the months since KansasFest, I have cleaned up the appropriately hacky code into something that was able to pass Apple’s review for their App Stores. Along with help from some great beta testers who found several bugs, I am proud to make version 1.0 available to everyone.

More information about ListenerGS.

Rand-Emonium Software has released version 3.0 of the Apple //gs build pipeline for Xcode.  The features added were created to aid in the development of BuGS.

Among the improvements in version 3.0 are:

• Support for the mame emulator along side GSport and GSplus.
• The build now creates a separate distribution disk image from the boot disk image. This makes it easier to go from a build directly to a image ready to ship to users.
• The build creates a ShrinkIt archive of the distribution within the build. That way, you have both a disk image and a ShrinkIt archive of your application ready to ship.
• Most error messages from the ORCA/M assembler are now visible right in the Xcode editor. In prior releases, error messages from ORCA/C or Merlin32 were parsed and now ORCA/M errors are supported also. This makes it easier to go from a problem in your code to exactly where that problem is in your editor.
• The build can now create markdown files in your project and convert them into Teach text files in your distribution image. That way, you can write your documentation using modern tools and make that documentation available to modern machines while also turning that same documentation into a file that can be loaded on a real GS. This functionality comes thanks to the new md2teach shell command, which is also released today.

More information about the Apple //gs Build Pipeline

Rand-Emonium Software is proud to announce BuGS an update to its arcade game for the Apple //gs. Prior to this release, the game kept track of your top 10 high scores so you could track your best games. In version 2.0, if your GS has network connectivity, you can see the top 10 global high scores and submit your own scores to the online database. And when you finish a game with a score that gets on your local top 10 high scores, that score is also uploaded to the database. Compete with the rest of the Apple // community to get the best scores in the game.

Even if you don’t have network connectivity in your GS, you can watch the competition from scores.rand-emonium.com. Scores have the initials of the player who submitted them, a date stamp and an indication of whether the game was played at 60 or 50 Hz.

For more information about the game and to download a copy, visit the BuGS page.

Rand-Emonium Software is proud to announce an update to the A2Bejeweled game for the Apple //e, //c, //c+ and //gs. A series of updates have been released over the last 12 months that have extended the game beyond that found in version 2.0 which shipped over four years ago:

Version 2.1 removed the requirement for a 65c02 processor making the game work on the unenhanced //e.

Version 2.2 could auto-detect a Mockingboard thanks to code re-used from the Total Replay project.

Version 2.3 addressed some bugs in the game that occurred on //c and //c+ machines.

Version 2.4 added auto-detection of the speech chip on a Mockingboard, again thanks to code from the Total Replay project.

Version 2.5 added a workaround for the buggy implementation of double lo-res on the Apple //e card for the Mac. The game should now work correctly on that platform.

Version 2.6 addressed a number of bugs in the Mockingboard code, especially with speech. When the game says “Excellent”, it now sounds more like the real word thanks to these fixes. This version was included in the incredible Total Replay 4.0 package.

Version 2.7 added the ability to configure the keys used to navigate the gems in the game. If you prefer something other than I-J-K-M and/or the arrow keys, you can now set it up with the keys you like best.

To get more information, watch a YouTube video of the game play, or get a link to the source code or a disk image of the game, visit the A2Bejeweled game page.

Rand-Emonium Software is proud to announce BuGS for the Apple //gs, a computer that is turning 35 years old this year. To commemorate the occasion, a classic arcade shooter where a series of bugs descend towards you through a field of mushrooms has been reproduced for this classic 16 bit computer.

The game runs at 60 frames per second on base hardware without the need of an accelerator. Control the player using a mouse or for an even more authentic feel, use an ADB trackball. Stereo sound cards are supported and the sound of the bugs on the screen will pan as they traverse the game field. Play a single player game or play a two player game with a friend. No matter what, if you get a high score, be sure to enter your initials to get the glory. For more information about the game and to download a copy, visit the BuGS page.

With nearly 25,000 lines of assembly code, this project represents the first substantial assembly language project attempted by Rand-Emonium Software. All of the code for the project is available on https://github.com/jeremysrand/BuGS. Many members of the Apple // community have contributed to this game and this document attempts to identify many of them.

Apple // Forever!!

Rand-Emonium Software has released version 2.7 of the 8-bit Apple // build pipeline for Xcode.  The build pipeline still supports AppleSoft BASIC, Merlin assembly and cc65 based projects.  Version 2.7 addresses some problems that came with newer releases of Xcode:

• The error messages from the compiler and assembler should now be visible in Xcode again. Also, support for sending error messages from Merlin back to Xcode has been added.
• All build products are put into the standard Xcode directories and no longer pollute your workspace. This also fixes cleaning the project which stopped working with the latest Xcode releases.
• The cc65 headers were not being found by Xcode which meant that auto-complete was not working for library routines. This should now be fixed.

Note that support for cc65 v2.13.3 has been removed. cc65 v2.17 is the only version which is supported in this release.