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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.'"
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'.
Hey, tard. Did you read the article.
[Gamasutra's A History of Gaming Platforms series continues with a look at the Apple II system. Perhaps best-remembered for its ubiquity in U.S. classrooms in the 1980s, the computer was also a popular gaming system. Need to catch up? Check out the first two articles in the series, covering the Commodore 64 and the Vectrex.]
TFA much?
And yes, the Apple II series was the first kick-ass game system. I'm old enough to remember first-hand. What was the Apple's competition? The TRS-80? I had one... the games were meh at best. Certainly, in any game that was released on both of those platforms, the Apple's version looked and sounded better.
Oh, yeah. What did Commodore have at this time? The PET? I heard rumors it had games.
Now, contemporaneous with the C64 in the Apple stable was the IIGS. Amazing, but still basically trailing edge. Like the absolute technological pinnacle in steam locomotives at the time that the diesel-electric was becoming the mainstream rail propulsion system. The C64 and the Amiga pwn'd the IIGS in almost every meaningful way. (Yes, I know what I'm talking about. I have all three.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The original Castle Wolfenstein.
Achtung! Damn exploding treasure chests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Wolfenstein
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?
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.
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
Why does every computer "historian" ALWAYS forgets Commodore 64?
Ultimas all the way to Ultima VI was available on C-64.
1) The C64 was popular but not very historical -- it came out late in 8-bit history -- it came out in 1982. The Apple ][ came out in 1977. As a reminder, 16-bit computers like the IBM PC were already available in 1981.
2) Sure things like Ultima were on the C64 too, but as ports coming months or years after the Apple ][ originals. People like Lord British used the Apple ][ as their premier platform all the way until Ultima 6.
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.
why not just play them in your web browser?
music lover since 1969
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! --
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.
] CALL -151
:) Last time I posted this, someone provided the relative branch alternative, thus saving a byte. However, I remember the above code from 20 years ago and that's the ways I likes it! If there's any demo competitions restricted to programs with a single digit number of bytes, that's my entry.
* 300: AD 30 C0 20 ED FD 4C 00 03
* 300G
This is:
300: LDA $C030 ; Toggle the speaker
303: JSR $FDED ; Print (random) contents of accumulator to screen
306: JMP $0300 ; And start all over again
Makes a wonderful visual clickfest on your screen that gets annoying. Imagine a school lab filled with machines running that.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
How about Ultima I, released in 1980? The VIC-20 wasn't released until 1981, and Ultima I didn't make it to the 64 until 1986.
It was called "Stun Copter". It has it's own Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Copter and.... It's been released for OS X! http://antell.com/software/games.html
Anyone with any leads on New World ROMS so I can fire up and install OS 9 or something? I have a stack (50+) of all my old MacAddict CDs and somewhere I know I have an "Inside Mac Games" from around 1996. That thing had on it the first game I ever bought (shareware). Realmz II.
Oh and Warlords. First turn based game I ever played. Man I love that. Although I loved cheats so I would use this program which would search active memory from a program for a value and then change it. (I only had the Warlords Demo, so I'd search for "turn" and when I was approaching 40 turn limit I'd reset it to 10)
And Taskmaker...
I'm laid up from Knee surgery. I know what I'm going to be wanting to do for the rest of the day.
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?
My first computer was two rocks and a stick. It had only one game, called two rocks and a stick. The expansion module, three rocks and a stick, was too expensive.
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.
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.
The C64 was released in August, 1982. The Vic 20 Jan 1981. The Vic was cassette only until 1982 and took 20 minutes to load a program. The PET I used had 4k of RAM and AWFUL games (with a max of 8k RAM, hard to do much).
;)
oh, where to begin... these are some of my earliest Apple ][ memories
The Oregon Trail (1970s, diskette version mid '80s)
Odyssey: The Comleat Apventure (1980) - written in integer BASIC, not MS-BASIC
Ultima I (1980)
Zork I (1980)
Zork II (1981)
Sneakers (1981)
Sabotage (1981)
Gorgon (1981)
Space Eggs (1981)
Castle Wolfenstein (1981)
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981 - and Hi Werdna!)
Softporn Adventure (1981) [text - graphical update became Leisure Suit Larry] - had to throw that in
maybe Aztek (may have been 1982...)
I didn't say Akalabeth (prequel to Ultima 1979-80) because I personally found it very unfun, but it was entertaining until I starved for the 300th time. Also the Prisoner (1980?), which some people liked, but I didn't.
I like how I can't play the Virtual Apple games on Safari.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Now mommy told you, not to play with two rocks and a stick. She said you'd go blind...
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)...
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.
And you apparently know nothing about early Ataris.
Ram limited? My Atari 800 had 48K of ram - it had 4 slots for RAM expansion. It also came with 8K standard - double the stock amount in the Apple IIs. Tape drive? Hardly. Never had one for my Atari - I had a floppy drive. The original Apple IIs came with a tape drive. And as for the 400 having "the worst keyboard on the face of the earth" - obviously you never tried typing any significant amounts of code onto the old Timex/Sinlair TI-99 keybaords. Think trying to program using a cell phone keyboard, or a Speak N Spell. Also the Ataris had a MOS 6502 processor running at 1.8 Mhz compared to the MOS 6502 processor running at 1 Mhz in the Apples. So how exactly is the computer running the same processor, but almost twice as fast something you "couldn't do much with" compared to the Apple? Oh yeah, I forgot to add that the price of the Apple II was $1300 compared to the $1000 price of the Atari. So, double the RAM, almost double to processing speed for $300 less. And you are correct - sound on the Apple IIs did suck, but the Ataris had excellent sound. I even had a fully digitized 2 second clip of some Van Halen song that would play on my old 800. And that was still in the 80s.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Remember when BYTE was really a JOURNAL and not a magazine (and now it's nothing)? InCider? Kilobaud! (MORE 'zines should have their index on the cover - It Was Awesome! we miss you Wayne - we also loved '73) 80-Micro? The old Dr. Dobb's? And a BUNCH of others.
There's nothing good anymore.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)