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The History of the Apple II as a Gaming Platform
Matt Barton writes "Gamasutra is running a feature on the venerable Apple II platform, which practically defined the early home computer industry and was home to many of the greatest games and developers of all time. The authors discuss the platform's lifespan and many iterations, struggles with illegal distribution, and legendary Apple II games such as Prince of Persia, John Madden Football, and Ultima. 'How big of a problem was piracy? Although several software authors claim that they stopped developing games because of rampant piracy and the subsequent loss of revenue, piracy did expose more computer owners to more games than they otherwise would have been -- this was at a time before ubiquitous demos made it easier to "try before you buy." Another benefit of this piracy is that much of the software archived today at online repositories are the cracked versions.'"
Why does every computer "historian" ALWAYS forgets Commodore 64?
Ultimas all the way to Ultima VI was available on C-64.
Ah yes, I can recollect spending many hours with pencil and paper designing circuits for the game Robot Odyssey. (Usually in the middle of English class...)
Crisis Mountain, Lode Runner, BoulderDash, Choplifter
That brings back memories of junior high school, and playing cracked versions of various arcade games (complete with signature opening screens) on the school's Apple //e machines. Not to mention 'hacking' the 5-1/4 SS floppies to get cheap DS usage. While today's games are certainly graphically superior, in many ways they've gotten to be somewhat pedestrian compared to the excitement of playing Dig Dug or Conan on the green monitors.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
The original Castle Wolfenstein.
Achtung! Damn exploding treasure chests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Wolfenstein
Oregon Trail!!!!
my favorite 3D space game.
best feature: autodocking with spacestations.
It's an Apple ][ - those brackets are absolutely necessary. Trust me.
Now get off my lawn, and don't come back until you can code in 6502 machine language hex codes - I don't want any of you assembly language sissies hanging around here.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Nine Princes in Amber game on an Apple IIe. Basically, slides show, text with options for you to take related to the text. Was a cool game for me, knowing the story line of the books.
Aztec all the way, baby! That game was fun *because* of the bugs. I loved walking the Indiana Jones dude on top of the water, on top of alligators, and using grenades to create garbled spider sprites running around. Sea Dragon was a kick, too.. SEEEAAAA DRAGOOON! Speaker modulation on the Apple IIe done right.
Shouldn't the icon next to this story be a big Monty Python foot?
I'm curious how many got into programming because of ...
;-) The 6502 was a nice CPU where one person could not only memorize all the opcodes, but understand the whole machine.
* "I wonder how this game works..." or
* "How do I remove the copy protection..."
* "How do I cheat..."
I'm a little biased *cough*, but there is a a half-decent emulator (with mockingboard support) available at http://applewin.berlios.de/
Gaming genres were defined in the '80s. I would highly recommend checking these out:
* Anything by Br0derbund! (Lode Runner, Drol, Spare Change, Captain Goodnight, Carmen Sandiago)
* Ultima series
* Anything by the "Beagle Bros" for just plain hacking fun
--
*C600G
My first computer was an Apple IIc. I came from a lower middle class family and it was a sacrifice for my mother to buy the machine for me second-hand. She did it because she recognized my passion and wanted me to have the opportunity to pursue it. But there was no way my family could afford to buy any software, really, much less games at $50 a pop.
Over the course of a couple of years I "acquired" two disk files full of software, much of it games. I paid for blank disks out of money I earned mowing lawns and such. I also accumulated a stack of magazines mostly donated by a teacher who took an interest in my interest and whose husband had an Apple II and a couple subscriptions.
Long story short, I'm running two IT-based businesses today and I'm grateful for a mother that cared, a teacher (and her husband) that cared and "pirate" software. No one lost anything from my "piracy" because there was absolutely ZERO chance that I ever would have been able to buy any of the software or half of the magazines that I had available to me back then.
All of that combined has defined the life I now lead and today I both give away software under OSS licenses and willingly pay for any commercial software that I use.
And most of us who did it would add improvements which we sent to the game authors.
I remember having 172k of RAM (on a 48k Apple II+) that I used as a RAM drive to run programs 1000 times faster, with a dual floppy setup so I could have a data disk and a program disk.
And it was fun creating the world's first play-by-mail role-playing games on it, doing nutso things like using word-processing macros to churn out character stories for each player, or automated D & D, Traveller, and other game system character generation.
Until Bill G rolled around this artificial IP concept really was just regarded as code hoarding. Copy protection was not just a challenge, it was rude, and you were honor-bound (back then I'd say honour-bound, since I was in Canada) to crack it - and then distro copies with the add-ons you improved the original game with.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
My grandma gave me her Apple //c and little 9" green screen monitor when I was in second grade. There was a store in the local mall that sold shareware, they had bins and bins of 5 1/4" floppies full of Apple ][ software. I had so many cool games for that machine. I had that before I had any game consoles or anything like that, and really, I played computer games way more than my consoles. I got Flight Simulator II for my birthday one year, then I got a joystick for that machine, too. Geez, nostalgia high.
Blasphemy!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Some years ago the author of the Atarisoft rendition of "Mario Bros" for the Apple // was writing about the title in a Usenet post, saying that Atarisoft never released the game yet it was leaked and everyone had it... and for that reason, he was still able to list it on his resume. :) That's gotta be weird, everyone knows your work yet you didn't get paid properly for it.
// a gaming platform, as did Wizardry.
Loderunner definitely made the Apple
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
I recall playing several really fun text adventure games when it was my turn to use one of the two computers in the whole school. There was one that went something like, you are in the woods and low on food, would you like to hunt? What would you like to hunt for, deer, or foxes? Oh, you didn't find any deer. You have Persished. Game Over. Anyone else remember this game, or know what it was called?
The Apple IIc was the first computer I ever put my greasy little fingers on. I learned to create some Basic games from books - oh how I miss Goto 10.
The picture in the article of Ultima IV takes me back. So many hours of my early teens lost playing that, Castle Wolfenstein and The Bard's Tale. I was addicted to the Bard's Tale, the glorious green screen of it!
Who else remembers making 5 1/4 inch disks double sided! Hell yeah. How cool was that. A pair of scissors or hole punch and suddenly you had twice as much storage!
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
...North Atlantic '86 and The Bard's Tale (I and II). They were the games that made me buy my first Apple (a IIc). I played them on a IIe in the library almost every day until it closed. I finally decided if I was going to save the world from Soviet or magical domination, I'd better get a computer at home so I could devote myself to the cause.
/.ers) were snared by similar "gateway" software?
In my case, playing games led to buying a computer, which led to an interest in how computers worked, which led to a change in career from administrator to self-taught computer hobbyist to organizational computer guru, a masters degree in information resource management, and a whole new career over the last 15 years as a technology manager. All becuase I got hooked on a couple of computer games.
I wonder just how many other computer-addicted people (e.g.
Oh well -- at least I don't sell PDAs on street corners near schools.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
but don't give out that not having a copy of the original is somehow beneficial!
it is if the original required some verification to use, like looking up something on a page in a manual that no one has anymore.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
no it isnt. its like insisting that you not put dog crap in it.
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
Phantasie was one my early favorite games on the C64, and for the first time I got to see the box in the article. I had a cracked copy and photocopied instructions, and played it for what seems like a long, long time.
Lots of people used to build/assemble clones of the Apple II. Apple solved that problem with the Mac. No cloned Macs, at least I never saw one.
IBM, on the other hand, published the Reference Manual. Anybody could build a PC clone. The result was that the PC and its clones became ubiquitous. Similarly, the most pirated software used to be MS-DOS, which became the standard. It makes one think that if Apple hadn't been so successful at stemming piracy, they might have done a lot better financially.
I know what you are saying, and agree with you to a large extent, but as a former 6502 hacker I am not sure you understand what you are talking about.
//e depended on nuances of a combination of hardware and software not just software. Disk reading routines were able to be controlled in software -- copy protected games would not include standard apple "DOS" but essentially invent their own disk reading routines. In order to copy a disk, you would have to get extra memory, try to load the program into it using its own disk reading routine, find the starting location of the program, remap this into a format that could fit on a normal disk, and then save it back to a disk (using a standard DOS loaded into your extra memory.) Some methods of protection altered the write timing cycles on the disk, varying sector timing / size, etc. In general you would need, to unprotect disks, a hardware-modified //e with extra memory.
.dsk image, and thus would be most likely lost as the original magnetic media fades -- an emulator built to emulate the nuances of the hardware would probably never be built, as even getting a method to accurately read some standardized format of the original magnetic media would be difficult / impossible. Thus the original article writer's statement is correct, whether he knew the details or not...
The majority of the copy protection routines on the Apple
Something that changes the read/write timing of a disk would be very, very difficult to emulate correctly, 100% of the time. A good fraction of copy-protected files could not even be made into a standard
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Uh, no - the C64 was released in 1982, and the Apple IIGS wasn't released until 1986 (that's right - two years after the first Macintosh). The Apple contemporaries to the C64 were the Apple II+ and Apple IIe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
Which is not to say that the Apple II wasn't an important gaming platform, but by the early 80's it was already showing its age.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
There was a game that I used to play on my Laser 128 (Apple IIc clone). I flew a helicopter, and was fighting against another helicopter as well as providing air support for my troops. The game would 2-D scroll side to side. I could drop 5 men from my helicopter paratrooper style, and there were floating balloons with cables. The helicopter had to "escort" tanks, antiaircraft trucks, "vans" and infantry
I always loved:
10 Print "Hello World"
20 Goto 10
That was the best game ever.
Um, no. the apple // was the worse machine ever. Who writes this crap?
I think that to talk about Apple's role in gaming, it might be useful to abstract some of the concepts that stemmed from Apple's popularity and ubiquity.
It wasn't just "video games" that made Apple great - it was the creation of "Home computer games", i.e. games that couldn't be played on the standalone devices or early consoles of the time.
For example:
Educational games emerged as a subgenre as part of the deals Apple did to make computers available to school.
RPGs were available before, but they flourished on the Apple II with Wizardry, Ultima, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic.
I think that it could be arguable that Real-Time Strategy games owe a debt of gratitutde to Rescue Raiders.
Graphical adventures can trace their roots to Sierra's early efforts such as Wizard & the Princess.
There were a whole group of poly-bagged games that pre-dated the boxed software that isn't as widely documented. I sometimes wish I could play Artillery on the Apple II again if I only spent some time trying to get the emulators and Dos 3.3 disks working.
Piracy on Apple II was rampant, but I think that was largely because that piracy was one of the areas where learning about how hardware & software interact created a generation of computer engineers. A 7th grader learning about how filesystems work and how software controls a disk drive? Common place when the kid was motivated to copy a game. I don't want to make a moral claim that it's right, but you can't deny how many engineers of my generation have a similar story.
Info on disk protection was widely available - getting Hardcore Computist magazine every month was a real treat, learning new things about how hardware & software worked. You didn't get a crack to download - you had to dig into the disk editors yourself and learn why machine code edits made the game playable. Great fun from the old days.
Does anyone remember the the ZORK Clone SMIRK? I could never find my way out of the maze. Anyone know where I can find this clone?
Oh fuck yeah! Bard's Tale was kick ass.
I use Apple][ for my engineering project. I first learnt machine code and assembly of 6502 then I started I cross compile code in Z80 and using I/O interface card as a digital logic analyser and eventually I created another Z80 computer. The simplicity of Apple][ hardware taught me a lot about PC interface. If you know this, you will quickly understand how XT, AT buses work. Besides the bus size getting bigger, the control signals are largely the same. Without the affordable Apple][ at that time, I will not be an engineer today.
Oregon Trail. (ftw!)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.mobygames.com/game/rescue-raiders
Anything by the "Beagle Bros" for just plain hacking fun
Ah! That took me back so fast, my brain is whiplashed. Painful.
I loved the Beagle Bros. They had some of the *coolest* hacks. I learned more about the Apple system from them than from anywhere else. Between Beagle Bros and the Sweet-16 mini-assembler (no more hand assembling! yes!), the Apple ][ was the *greatest* platform for budding programmers.
When people claim Microsoft started the computer revolution, I laugh gently, pat them on the head, and say, "Ah, you're so *cute*." The Apple ][ started it, followed by all the others: Commodore, Atari, Tandy, etc. *Those* were the days.
Not that I'd go back. I do like where we're at today (though we should've been here 10 years ago).
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Anyone remember Olympic Decathalon for Apple ][ from Microsoft? That game must have destroyed thousands of keyboards.
Stop! Don't copy that floppy!
Many an nour of 'study hall' in 8th grade was spent playing Sierra's Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess (d*mn snake!).
I used Apple][ for my engineering project. It is my first computer. I learnt a lot from it. I learnt Basic, machine code, assembly, I/O signaling and eventually I could cross compile Z80 code and using an I/O card as a digital signal analyser to design and create my first Z80 computer. Without this affordable computer, I will not be an engineer today. Game is my first incentive leading me to something more interesting.
What good are the original games if you can't play them because they're copy-protected? What good is a phone call if you're unable to speak?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Heh, Ultima II pretty much rocked my world in high school (yes, I know I'm dating myself). I wasted nearly an entire summer glued to a green monitor while hacking away in some far-off dungeon. Loderunner also consumed a lot of time I could have been using for stuff like homework. I even missed BASIC programming; it may have been a relatively slow, high-level language but it was so easy to understand that even an idiot could pick up the basics (no pun intended) in a relatively short time.
This space for rent!
Gotta love Lode Runner, Choplifter, Karateka, and Conan, but my top billing has to go to Wizardry. That game was unbelievably addictive!
In no particular order:
- Telengard but who knows how far I got or even if I made any progress period. This was one stood out in my memories because it was far more open ended than anything else I played at the time.
- Agent USA was austenisbly a way to learn US geography by battling "fuzbodies" across the country. For some reason I remember pitched battles in Denver, CO.
- Ultima IV was something I definitely remember beating...
- Ultima V was even better! Yay for throwing magic axes diagonally!
- Wings of Fury was unique in the huge amount of play. Trying to sink the last ships took a lot of hits.
Some of these games, like the Ultima ones where multiple disks where if you had two drives it made things easier. One thing that stood out for these games is how underpowered the graphics and sound was for these games where the Commedore 64 versions of the same games often looked and sounded better. That is unless you had the "Phasor" sound card. I can't recall if any of these games used or was helped by the "80 Column Text Card". Especially for a game like Wings of Fury a two button analog controller is a must have.
Foundly remember the Apple ][. Programming it in BASIC in 6-8th grade, playing Wizardy, Ultima 2/3/4/5, Phantasie, Castle Wolf, ahh the good old days. Think my parents paid about $1200 for a //e with 128k and 2 floppy drives. I also took part in the "scene" with my Apple Cat modem and PPP sites for transferring the warez.
That game was "Rescue Raiders".
Wiki Link..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_raiders
He who laughs last is at 300 baud.
I used to dream up new L0de Runner boards! That game rocked on the Apple //e. Snack Attack was popular in our coaches office. I still have some of my original 5-1/4" floppies of this stuff, and they still run fine. The disks still hold data just fine, yet my 1 year old AIT tapes, fail often. An elephant never forgets!
A946 9900 00A9 6999 0001 A972 9900 02A9 7399 0003 A974 9900 04A9 2199 0005
:\)
(I think that should print "First!", but my 6502 machine code is rusty.
and then there was SWotL, the game whose acronym sounds vaguely like it should be a porno :) I'd really love to see a remake of the game utilizing todays hardware.
I got sent to a school for gifted kids starting in the 5th grade (http://www.spsd.net/Handley/index.htm) and in a little room across the hall from the math classroom, was a pair of Apple ][+ machines. First time I had ever seen a REAL computer in person. There was a crowd of guys (all 6th graders) huddled around one machine playing a game called "Pulsar". It was similar to "Star Castle", except your ship moved strictly in a circular motion around the shielded ship in the center. On the second machine was a kid typing up his own little app with a book on Basic next to him. From that moment forward, I spent all of my free time (or as much of it as they allowed me to) in the computer room. A week after I saw the Apples, I took home every manual we had that came with those machines and studied them cover to cover. These were EXCELLENT reference material with code examples in basic and ML.
One month to the day I wrote my first little program. Then another, and another, then I bought graphing paper and started making images on the screens, which eneded up as shape tables, which by the end of the year turned into moving objects.
After that, I was obsessed with writing my own games, with was only magnified when my mother bought an Atari 800XL for me for christmas a couple of years later. By high school, I had written games in not only basic, but in 6502 ML thanks to books by Compute! publishing.
To this day I still have thoughts of taking one of my old games and reworking it to something modern. I may do it too.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Um... do you remember some of the protection mechanisms used on those games? I had one floppy where they physically damaged a sector after writing the game... the disk was not copyable to another medium as that sector always generated a read error, but the game wouldn't play without that sector existing.
Without the cracked version, you wouldn't have an archived version of that game once the original medium failed. I ended up snagging a cracked version when my disk finally died.
The equivalent would be having a version of the Mona Lisa that couldn't be photographed or copied in any other way without defeating some sort of anticopying device. You still have the original, but any copies, by definition, are cracked copies. Same goes for many of these games. It's not that not having a copy of the original is beneficial, it's that having a cracked copy that can be duplicated is beneficial... if nobody had cracked it, the game might no longer be available.
Not nearly as many as would ultimately come out for the C-64 but we're talking about three years earlier and a much smaller market. We're talking about eight years before the C-64 game market was so crowded that it imploded.
There were many good games for the Apple when the market was Apple ][s, TRS-80s, Pets and Compu-Colors. It was the gamers choice. Built in 'high res' graphics (two pages with the expanded memory), game controllers and basic sound. Makes me want to fire the old girl up.
I bet Bill Budge is still living the high life on all those great games from back in the day.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Rescue Raiders
Great game.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
armor alley
My emulator, KEGS, gets most of the low-level disk details right. You can get it at http://kegs.sourceforge.net/. It's not that hard to do low-level disk timings. It's even easier to do straight bits from the drive, but I wrote KEGS for Pentium-class machines, so it worries about performance.
.nib format is woefully inadequate), and I never bothered. So there's no easy way to get a low-level description of an Apple II disk into KEGS, other than .nib images, which can't encode many types of copy protection.
However, I would have needed to create a new disk-image format for KEGS to use (the
I was a good kid. But that's not really true. There was a moral ambiguity. My dad brought home an Apple ][+ in 1978 - and I was hooked. As soon as I discovered copy protection, I became disturbed. Why could a friend have a game and we couldn't share? I'd already started learning BASIC and 6502 machine language; but it didn't take me long to figure out how to "copy" something that wasn't meant to be copied. Disk duplication software was unreliable. Removal of the protection was the only way. And who did it really hurt...
Some people pirated software. They collected it like baseball cards. Along comes an awkward teenager. All of a sudden, he has purpose and is "popular." Trading and playing software becomes less interesting than removal of protection. And notoriety does wonders for ego.
You get an aliases. Alien, MicroMuncher, Optimus Prime and the Evil Sock... just to name a few (all the same person.) And the art and science of computing starts being applied to your evil deeds. It also leeds you to competition with other aliases that become friends; MicroManiac, and the Saint to name a couple. Removing protection isn't good enough. Things need to work exactly like the original. Something that fits on a disk (with potentially a foreign OS) must now be reduced to a file. And it must save high scores, or get you to the next level. Self loading software of minimum size. And then the glorious splash page! The fun of graphic arts and animation; sometimes the quality of which is better than the games its plastered over.
For example... Dan Gorlin writes Airheart. A truly revolutionary game. And a revoluationary protection scheme. 18 sectors - and too much data to put on a single disk. What is a cracker to do? Re-write the OS to support block compression of course on a standard 16 sector format.
Then a brutal realization as you enter adulthood. What if someone did that to you? Every excuse you had to copy or crack is recognized as an excuse. You feel bad. You wish you had written games instead of breaking them. You even go so far as to seek forgiveness from people who were truly exceptional. To create - that is the best you can do.
Every time I see the old monikers I feel like crap. Going over asimov and noting the only reason certain software survives because YOU did something immoral - its like a WALL OF SHAME. I hang my head and punish myself a little more. I have nothing but reverance for the 8-bit pioneers and gaming gods.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
In Chicago in 1981 I found it very easy to get hired to copy arcade games for the Apple, Atari, and C64 (all 6502). Roklan and Image Producers hired me to do Berzerk and Wizard of Wor (one was supposedly for Microsoft). There was no training or local expertise available, you just had to reverse engineer them. Then Atari(?) successfully sued somebody for a PacMan ripoff, and the whole bubble quickly burst...
The Apple ][ was infamous for the bizarre layout of the graphics memory (supposedly Woz chose it to save a chip, or maybe a layer on the circuit board). And if the high bit was set, all the pixels in that byte shifted, creating the other two available colors.
I found a hidden 'Hot Coffee' style easter egg in the text strings for Sierra's 'Wizard and the Princess'-- the placeholder text for the default/generic "I don't know how to **** something" reply was the f-word (never displayed)...
We got an Apple II in 1979 or 80. I was about 8 or 9 years old. I learned BASIC on it, but before that I learned the joy of computer gaming. It had 48k of RAM!!! Kickass!!! When we finally upgraded it to 64K I thought I was ready to play with the big boys.
..I guess...adventure game w/some vector graphics...I remember finding a key in a chest and getting stuck in a damn forest that went on forever (the guy at the computer store said "Keep going north and west," yeah.. I never got out of that damn forest.
The first games we got for our Apple II were brought home by my dad with the computer. "Mystery House," which was an awesome text based
Then there was AppleTrek - a star trek clone where you fight the "Klarnons" - For the available resources of the day these games were awesome.
Later on I got Lode Runner (which was awesome cause you could make your own maps) and eventually progressed into some really cool games like "The Bard's Tale" and Ultima II/Ultima IV (which were actually really, really cool games that seemed massive at the time and if someone wants to release a version for Palm devices I would pay quite a bit for it).
For the amount of resources available (my treo seems like a supercomputer compared to it) the games on the Apple II were indeed amazing.
There was another first that came with the Apple II my family had as well (though I didn't realize it at the the time) - it was my first use of pirated software.
I still remember that my dad would come home from computer meetings (they'd have them at the computer store or or YMCA in our town in California) and would give me a bunch of floppies - I still remember a bunch of the games I have had this PCP (Pacific Coast Pirates)logo - at the time I didn't know what that meant. Later on as I got older and started looking for software at these mini convetions myself I noticed that usually if a friend gave you a copy of a game on a 5.25 floppy it would have a logo...I am trying to remember some of the others....At that time most people didn't think of it any differently than dubbing a cassette tape (which, incidentally was the storage medium for the very first Apple II games we had).
Actually, that sounds more like Armor Alley then Rescue Raiders. My family (well, my dad and my sisters) used to play that all the time because you could play co-op against the computer to get your giant convoy of tanks and one van to the other side of the screen. Good times.
All the games for the Apple IIe looked like crap because of those silly green monitors. Except, of course, for Lode Runner, which was unaffected.
God, I could write a book on so many stories about the Apple IIe and C64 and gaming. And how gaming really got me into computers back then. Spending endless hours of trying to solve Ultima 1-V or Bards Tales or even Moebius before my friends. Countless hours of hacking the programs to give me all stats/items I wanted. Which in turn lead me to pirating the software and distributing the software on BBS like Garden North/East/West/South, The Phenix BBS (2mg online!!!) under an assumed elite cracking group called The Brotherhood of Hades (Bob where are you?). All of this provided a path that I would later take on as my career later in life.
No regrets folks, no regrets.......TBH FOR LIFE!!!
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
Did this actually come out on the Apple ][? This was a mid-90s game, and if the ][ wasn't dead by then, I can't imagine it made much of a job of this game, as its main USP was the fluid, motion-captured animation of the characters.
I write as an ignorant Brit who couldn't have afforded an Apple ][ in a million years.
The picture of the "original" Apple //c in the article appears to actually be a newer model. You can tell by its platinum-colored keyboard. Original versions had a tan keyboard. There were technical differences as well...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc#Memory_Expansion_IIc_.28ROM_version_.273.27.29IIc
Stargate (side scroll space shooter)
Empire (war game)
California Games (sports)
The Last Ninja (action)
Way back when, I saved up for a long long time to buy my first computer. However due to extraordinarily high expense of the Apple ][ I ended up buying an Atari 1200XL, basically an upgraded Atari 800.
I was always slightly jealous of my Apple-owning friends. They had these really cool magazines that came with software, some of the magazines even had disks inside of them! Their computers had disk drives, whereas mine had a hokeyed up tape drive since floppy drives were so expensive. Most of the time I'd spend hours typing in a program, finally get it to work, and then get yelled at to go to bed so would have to turn off the computer. Program lost. One of my friends even got published in one of the magazines for showing a GOSUB routine or something like that that allowed easy programming of text based adventures.
I was in 9th grade, so this would be 1981, and learning computers was a whole ton of fun. I only wish it were easier to get my son, now 12, interested in programming rather than just playing the games. I tried Kids Programming Language, but I fear that kids these days just don't have the patience for writing code one line at a time, pressing run to see if it works, and then tweaking the code repetitively until it works. After seeing Unreal Tournament or some modern game, it must seem a little hokey to type all this stuff in just to move an icon from one side of the screen to another, or add 2+2 etc.
My biggest joy was finally figuring out sprites on the Atari. After I figured that out I could finally make a graphical game. I think it was Craps or something lame.
Oh the joys of reminiscing. Kids these days...
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Many game disks used special nonstandard physical formatting that ordinary Atari drives *could not* replicate (*). One example was use of duplicate sector numbers. My memory on this isn't perfect, and I'm filling in the gaps with guesswork, but IIRC it relied on having two sectors with different contents that were given duplicate numbers.
When the drive was told "read sector X", it'd be semi-random which of the two arrived under the read head first. So, copy protection code could request data from the "same"-numbered sector and check its contents on successive reads. By the law of averages- possibly with some timing randomisation to help things- it would sooner or later get the "other" sector, and know that it was a genuine (nonstandard factory-made) disc.
When such a disc was copied by an ordinary drive (even on a sector-by-sector basis) it would see one of the sectors first and only copy that. Even knowing about the copy protection and how it works wouldn't help us- we still *can't* write write duplicate-numbered sectors even if we want to. (**)
The drive could *read* these and other weird formats- albeit sometimes in a backward way that wasn't always healthy for the drive- but there was no physical way to replicate the nonstandard structure using a plain Atari drive.
(*) Reason being that the Atari floppy drives were "smart" (relatively speaking), and the logic that handled physical formatting of the magnetic structure was built-in to the drive's circuitry. You could start formatting a disk, turn the computer off, and the drive would complete the physical format, although it wouldn't write the filesystem.
Therefore (*IIRC*) the physical disk formatting that you could create with the drives was limited to those that the drive's circuitry- and hardware- was designed to handle. I'm not sure if there were any sneaky ways around this- getting low-level or pseudo-low-level access to the formatting circuitry- without actually modifying the drive itself. I *do* know that there were many circuit boards for the 1050 drive that improved its performance and let it copy more disks.
And (getting back to the parent's reply), if a standard disk image relies on the "normal" expected disk layout and doesn't include support for nonstandard physical hacks like duplicate sectors *and* the emulator doesn't replicate the pseudo-random timing/read issues of the physical drive rotation, then you can't replicate- let alone run- a copy protected program on one.
(**) The obvious route around this, of course, is to simply bypass or disable the code that checks for copy protection. Easier said than done maybe, but certainly doable- after all, you have to be able to read the program to load it, and once that's done it's a question of finding the protection and rewriting the hacked version to an ordinary disc.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The original Prince of Persia was originally created for the Apple ][ in 1989, so naturally the computer did a good job of it. All the beautifully animated character graphics were an evolution of Jordan Mechner's work on Karateka.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
For some of us the games were of secondary interest. Lots of copies of the Apple ][ motherboard were floating around, and if you didn't mind soldering in 100 ICs and building a case and power supply you could have an Apple ][ clone for a fraction of the cost of a real one. Then you could build a Z80 card and run CP/M and get a C compiler, or if Pascal was your thing you could run the p-system. Heck, the Apple dealers would sell you a technical manual with the motherboard schematic and a monitor ROM listing! The possibilities were endless. http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/116
But my all time favrote, was The Eamon Adventures by Donald Brown. You didnt like how they worked? Modify them. We had a modified Inn disk that you could use to store special weapons.
It was the basic origin for 'FreshMeat' HeHe!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I believe the name of the game is 'Armor Alley' -- it was also available for the Macintosh...
Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat.
I didn't buy a single piece of software. I even pirated the software I used to pirate other software. The people concerned about piracy were right.
I'm curious how many got into programming because of Robot Odyssey.
I'm actually a bit surprised that people are listing so many plain ol' arcade-style games here. I tired of those quickly, and moved on to writing my own. Robot Odyssey is the only one that held my attention -- and I still think it's one of the top 3 games ever.
It's got robots, a soldering iron, and a lab where you can burn your own ICs. How is this not awesome? That's 10 times more awesome than Lode Runner (move left and right) or Carmen Sandiego (a state machine of an almanac).
We're talking about hardware piracy here. Apple never got a cent from any of the clones that my buddies built. I saw lots of pirate Apple II clones. I never saw a pirate version of a Mac.
I can't remember how they did it but Apple did a pretty good job of slamming the door on random motherboard manufacturers. Of course the point of the GP was that shutting down the pirates might not have been that clever.
THANKS! That name has been bugging me for months. It is rescue raiders. I hadn't heard of Armor Alley, although it looks very similar. Now to set up an emulator. . .
There's apparently a plugin for Firefox but they provide no means for downloading it manually and it won't install automatically.
Shhhh, you cant start making sense, its not allowed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
that you'd say Aztec. Also, Gemstone Warrior, if IIRC. And Repton.
-Clio
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Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Thanks to you both, flowsnake and Colourspace, much appreciated.
Just have to find the right place in the hex editor and change the instructions to no-ops or make them jump in the right place. ;-)
I remember when games loaded in memory. People with Wildcards would take a snapshot dump and save to floppies then execute them with the "brun" command.
Fontrix was a great graphics editor. People used that to edit the title page and leave their signature, Cracked by the ...
There were also neat stuff one could do in the monitor.
] call -151
$ 7fdg
I enjoyed reading books like Beneath Apple Dos and Pro-Dos, Hardcore Computing journals and the Beagle Bros. Those were the good ole days. Gosh, I'm feeling old.
Larry Bird vs. Doctor J.
Why? Because even way back in the 80's, you could play a sports video game with a joystick where you could shatter the backboard, resulting in the janitorial staff coming out onto the court with a broom.
Best
basketball game
EVER
I haven't tried the linked game yet (downloading right now,) but does the Elder Brother paypack trick still work?
For those new to the game, you could borrow money at the rate of 10% interest per month. The trick was to pay back more than you owed, so your debt was negative. Your elder brother effectively owed you, and "charged" 10% interest on that loan. In the big picture, this paid better than the actual bank which gave something like 6% on your deposit.
Drawback was you couldn't really withdraw from him, I think the game limited loans to twice of what you had on hand. But the need for that was rare, you'd typically have your warehouse and ship filled to the brim with contraband (opium) ready to sell for quick money, and kept some petty cash in the bank.
-Captain Goodnight
-Bruce Lee
-Ghostbusters
-Zork 1 & 2
-Airheart
-Wings of Fury
-Silent Service
-Infiltrator 1 & 2
-Russki Duck
-H.E.R.O.
-Spy vs. Spy 1 & 2
-Rescue Raiders
-Jake Cutter Beyond Rescue Raiders (FTW!!)
-Skyfox
-Arctic Fox
-Some kind of text Star Trek game, with actual "klingons" and various quotes from ancient Roman philosophers when you hit the boundary of the galaxy.
-A ton of smaller programs that were pulled from various sources. "Enterprise Square" in Oklahoma City has a series of games out -- mowing lawns, oil exploration, a supply/demand economic simulator.
It'd take me a week to scour my memory of all the Apple games. However, my ftp program is currently going to work on asimov's server, so I'll see just what it pulls back. AWESOME.
Thanks again to the Woz.
...that some of so-called "Apple II" games mentioned came out earlier on Commodore C-64 and Atari 800XL with better graphics and sound. Not only that, but on those computers you could use a regular 9-pin joystick (easily borrowed from the Atari 2600 console) to play them as intended instead of some keyboard-based kludge.
It was a typing game where a spaceship in a 8x8? street grid pattern with enemies spawning at the edge of the screen where one hand flew and one hand shot. Does anyone remember the name?
Ok, I was one of those pirates. I didn't actually hack a single game myself, but I ended up being the "middle man" (or really, teen) between two large hacking/distribution groups in the Washington D.C. area. The reason I got in to both groups? I had an original copy of Wizardry, and nobody else did. I swear my copy must have been spread to hundreds.
By the time it all ended with the demise of the Apple II's run, I had over 3K floppies worth of games, copies, saved games, etc. My father would go out and purchase boxes of floppies by the hundreds if he knew I was going to one of my two friend's houses that were in the rings. I'd come home with 50 or more diskettes full of stuff. Heck, we even drilled holes into the side of the disk drives so you could insert a screwdriver into it to adjust the speed for those games that had speed sensitive writes incorporated into the copies. That was always fun.
A good number of the games I never played more than once to try it, and I did buy quite a few of the games. I had original copies of all the Wizardry games released, originals of all the Ultimas, Bard's Tales, and Infocom adventures. It was the arcade games that I generally pirated, because I didn't like them THAT much. Although I can't remember the actual name for the life of me, the one game I would have considered buying was the one where you dug holes to trap the apples, while climbing up and down ladders to evade them. That game was a challenge better than Pac-Man ever was. What was that game? Apple Dig? Bah, I can't remember.
Man, those were the good old days, where software was released without bugs requiring 10 patches to fix. I swear companies leave major bugs in just to defeat the "zero day" crowd.
I remember when I upgraded to the AppleCat modem - I think it did 1200 or 2400 baud, and coupled with an file transfer utility (CatFur) written by a guy named "the Micron". I met the guy a few times a computer shows. (Hey K.!) IIRC, the utility took advantage of the applecat modem and doubled(?) transfer speeds when you had the same modem on both ends. It revolutionized pirating! I -literally- have 1000+ disks of software, text files, etc up in the attic. I just wish there was an easier way to transfer them up to my PC for permanent storage. The only way I know of is to transfer them serially via modems. Why can't someone just build a USB-to-Apple drive adapter? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia_(video_game)
Came out in 1989, written for the Apple II and ported to all the other platforms.
1984.... in high skool and discovering the all the //e models and a few ][+ models. I always made sure to pick the computer with dual floppies in class. Made copying easier. (BRUN DISKMUNCHER 1.1)
Eventually made friends with the guys that had all the cracked games and remember carrying my 2 flip-n-files all day.
I was good at Loderunner ( to kill the sound during class)and remember having about 17 extra players and may have gotten to only about level 75 and 150 that game had. All of us played beyond castle wolfenstein, and I managed to kill Hitler once.
Didn't get my own computer until my Dad bought me a used ][+ for $200 with no disk drive in 1987. Eventually bought a controller card and two aftermarket drives. My ][+ had a encoder board that allowed true lower case, shift key, autorepeat, and a keyboard buffer. A year later, I paid $150 for a AE Viewmaster 80column card and I could run Appleworks now! Hated that I could not run new programs for the enhanced //e though.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
I think I spent too much time playing games as a kid. The largest factor in my moving to Oregon was having played Oregon trail. I'm quite disappointed to find out that if you eat Amanita Muscaria you only THINK you have the ability to throw fireballs.. *-I lied.. I've never eaten the red mushrooms.. I hear the ones that stain blue are good though
Does anyone remember Lemonade Stand? That was the first game I played on the Apple ][. I would love to have that game redone on my iPhone. Would that be sweet? I love when old games are ported to new devices... like PacMan as a iGoogle widget (flash). Cool.
Wildcards? Nah, that stuff was for wimps and it made HUGE game images which took a long time to transfer over a 1200 baud modem (2400 if you were lucky) and did the classic shutter window loading splash screen.
;^)
Real game cracks were done by tracing the boot loader stages one-by-one until the game was loaded into memory. Basically, you started by making a copy of the floppy rom boot-loader in ram and using it to load the first boot sector, disassemble the boot loader, patch it in hex or rewriting them as necessary, and then when the app was all loaded, then hit the reset (or ctrl-reset) to jump into a custom os that is hidden in 0x300 memory to save the app image into the smallest possible file so you could store 5-10 game images on the same floppy. If we had to "cheat" because the reset vector was compromized, we wired up the NMI on the motherboard to a push button switch...
Not saying that anything like this ever actually happened, though...
Crisis Mountain, Lady Tut, Lode Runner, Dark Lord, every single Ultima, and.... ... ... ...
THE MAGIC CANDLE
Anyone? I got suck a kick when I first cracked it myself. I still remember it being on Data East's Robocop.
Swordsman / 202 Alliance forever!
I bought my Apple ][ in 1979. It HAD true lower case, and I read DrDobb's to find the snippet of machine code for the sweet-16 interpreter that would make the shift key work like a regular shift key. The lower case was in the box, but wasn't in the keyboard.
][+ changed all that, however, with the built-in Microsoft Basic (yes, it was slow and needed more RAM). God I wish I'd kept it - serial number was less than 33,000 (32668 or something else similar to 32768 - 2^15).
The disk driver was unlike anything else on the market - you could remap the sector addresses, speed it up and increase 5.25 disk storage from the stock 140K to as much as 180K - COOL.
I still have the red book, however.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
You're correct, this did delve venture into the realm of Commodore. I do have quite a history and thus a not-so-objective point of view on the subject, but What about Amiga?
The Amiga 500 was made by Commodore, but was really quite revolutionary at the time. I would find a comparison of the Apple II (gs) and the Amiga as a gaming platform very interesting, because in many ways the Amiga was pigeonholed by gaming, when in fact it was a platform with extreme promise in a fuller spectrum of applications.
I miss the days when truly proprietary chip sets were available for personal and business computing. The computer industry as a whole suffered from the loss of the ability to really comparison shop between computer hardware. I think people have the illusion of options with the presence of Linux, Apple, and the various Windows OEM machines (like HP, Dell, Sony). In truth, the hardware comparisons are subtleties compared to walking into a computer shop and being able to look at an Atari [ST], an Apple, a Commodore 64 & 128, a Commodore Amiga (500 -- marketed as a gaming machine and the 1000/2000 -- a real full sized desktop), and an Apple Macintosh. There was a day when these were all on the shelves simultaneously.
Not only it is true, but I played it a few weeks ago on the Apple II emulator as well. I even like the Apple version, because the emulator allows me to save at any time :-).
My personal favorite from that era was a game called Star Blazer by Tony Suzuki. The game itself was not particularly original--a side scrolling shooter where you were mainly attacking ground targets. But the physics was very good--when you dropped a bomb, the bomb took on the velocity of your plane, meaning that you could do all sorts of tricks like "lofting" bombs. And it had the best progression of difficulty that I've seen in any game. On each level, there was an "optional technique" that you could discover, which was not necessary to pass the level, but greatly enhanced your score. And then on the next level, that same technique would turn out to be crucial, so each level sort of functioned as training for the one to come.
If you can dig up your 6502 notes, perhaps you can try your hand at developing for the NES.
SSIA
Aw crap: http://www.greggman.com/games/silas.htm
You got me, man. I didn't know there were two...
-Clio
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Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com