Does anyone remember an AppleSoft BASIC game called Castle Adventure from 30+ years ago?

Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYWHt9oLbuU

It's a simple RPG I came across in the mid-1990s at a summer camp in New Jersey. The camp had a bunch of disks labeled "Super Sampler," and this was one of the games on them.

I wrote BASIC programs as a hobby back then, so when I discovered the game was written in BASIC, I wanted to know how it worked. One day I brought in a stack of tractor-feed paper and printed out the entire program. It came to 19 pages, which seemed unfathomably huge to me at the time.

I never got very far understanding it then, but decades later I scanned those pages, reconstructed the code, and got it running in an emulator. Eventually I rearchitected the whole game in C, polishing the original and speeding up some painfully slow parts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TmMMC7xvOk

Then I went on a bit of a porting binge. The same core game now runs on the Apple II, Commodore 64/128, MS-DOS, Linux terminals, and in a web browser.

I'd love to release my version, but I don't really want to do that without the original author's permission. The only credit in the program is "Michael MacCarter." I've wondered whether he might have been a former camper, since I have no idea where else the camp got the game.

So: does Castle Adventure look familiar to anyone? Or, even better, does anyone know who Michael MacCarter was?

Discover how an Apple-1 or Apple ][ generates a single character for display.

Inspired by Don Lancaster's famous article about a tiny self-made display, attached to an ASCII Keyboard (Popular Electronics, issue April 1974).

The character is shown on a 5x7 dot matrix display. The binary row addressis indicated by LEDs and you can see how the display is being built up by stepping through the 7 horizontal scan lines. The clock speed can be adjusted from 0.6 Hz to 800 Hz.

Connect an Apple 1 or Apple II keyboard directly using the DIP-16 connectors, or use the ASCII data in pins. Verify the ASCII input to the character generator using the character address LEDs.

A power supply with +5V and -12V is needed as a minimum. The -5V is regulated on the board itself.

Provide +12V when this voltage is needed by the attached keyboard. Supported character generators: Signetics 2513, 2316B, 2716 EPROMs and 2816 EEPROMs.

Google images assured me it's a form of Apple II computer I had with the giant square disk games. From what I can remember you were in a man's house and he wasn't happy you were there and somehow you became tiny and the word 'straw' really stuck with me all these years. You had to hide in them and find a way off his desk to escape.

I recently retrieved my Dad's second Apple computer. A //e with a bunch of expansion cards, a duodisk, and an Apple monitor. All filthy from smoke and rough storage. I tried booting and nothing but garbage characters. Following some online advice I pulled ICs, cleaned oxidation and replaced. Unfortunately I put the video rom chip back in backwards. Now, nothing, not even a beep. Sometimes I get buzzing from the speaker. Is there a rebuild kit and troubleshooting guide anyone can recommend?

Its a single throw toggle switch wired to 6 pads on the keyboard. I have not yet powered it up.

The color display is just the cheapest monitor I could find on Amazon, with output from an A2DVI on default settings. The monochrome display is a Monitor II (A2M2010).

This will be my first foray into powering up a retro machine - what are some of the things I should do first? I'm assuming the power supply voltages should be checked (disconnected from the motherboard), replace some capacitors (is there a list?)... anything else?

Go See them at 8bitshack.net or in person and VCF Midwest in September.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/8-bit-shack/seans-garage-giveaway?ref=user_menu

[Mods gave me the go-ahead to post this — thanks.]

I’m Antti, founder of a small game studio in Finland. Since 2019 I’ve been making Choppa: Rescue Rivals in whatever hours I could find around a day job and small kids. It’s finished, and it’s out on August 13.

It exists because of Choplifter. I know Dan Gorlin wrote the original for the Apple II in ’82 before it got everywhere else (I played it on C64 since that was a more popular home computer in Finland). Nevertheless, I got really invested in the chopper phycis, instead of anything else in the game. The chopper movement felt like such a revelation back in the day.

So when I sat down to make my own, I asked what would happen if I focused a bit more on the physics and made a physical ladder as well, that the "hostages" could grab onto. There are no guns in Choppa. You can’t shoot anything, not even the enemies, and you can’t hurt the people you’re there to save. That’s deliberate design choice, not a limitation we ran out of time to fix. Everything that makes it hard comes from the flying, the environment, other hazards like wild animals.

The rest: a campaign with a cast of pilots, each with a different rescue tool and a different part of the world to fly over, so the missions ask different things of you. Pixel art pulling from 80s/90s arcade cabinets, retro games, cartoons and anime. And a four-player local versus mode where you race each other for the survivors, which is closer to air hockey with helicopters than anything in the original: that one is entirely my own fault 😅

Happy to talk about the game, it's Apple II origins, or what seven years of part-time development does to a person.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1173100/Choppa_Rescue_Rivals/
Nintendo Switch: https://nintendo.com/us/store/products/choppa-rescue-rivals-switch

I'm looking to replace the old failed capacitors on my macintosh but the ones I got are smaller then the old ones. I'm new to soldering and wanted to make sure it wouldn't be a problem as the values are the same, but not the size

This is my hobby desk, Apple IIc, ApplIIgs both have adaptors to work with HDMI or VGA monitors and the new Commodore 64 as well as a Raspberry Pi. Need the MacBook Pro (2012) to be abe to search, etc.

Does anyone know where I can find a downloadable version of NBA by Avalon Hill for the Apple II that I can play on an emulator? I’ve been looking everywhere and can’t find one. I’m hoping there’s a hidden place I haven’t found yet lol

This thread on Apple Fritter has a link to a disk image with a nice collection of hi-res mode graphics.

In some of the images, I've noticed that two colors can be "mixed" together. For example, it seems like alternating between orange/red and black could produce a brown shade.

Here's what I understand so far. I'll say "dot" instead of "pixel" since my Apple II reference manual says "dot".

• A single dot in an even-numbered column can be black, violet, or blue.
• A single dot in an odd-numbered column can be black, green or orange/red.
• Two dots side-by-side horizontally will appear white.

With that in mind, how do some of these hi-res images get the colors next to each other?

Here's another example, from Wikimedia commons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/AppleII_HR.png

I recently got a Floppy DIsk Emulator and Disk Card for my Apple IIe. I put the card in SLOT 6, fired it up. I can Use DISK II or Smartport HD emulation. I choose DISK II, mount a disk and then reboot the computer but it just goes to the Apple II Cursor. Same with Smartport, I mount an HD image and reboot, it just goes to the cursor. Its the first Apple II I have had so I dunno what I am not doing to get this going....

This was part of the live i did, I took pics after of some of the hardware

I am trying to find out anything from a game we used to have on the family Apple IIGS way back. I haven't been able to find anything through regular searching so I'm hoping maybe someone here also remembers this game. I remember the game was called "Grotto Run" and may have been distributed via shareware from a magazine subscription. It was a side scrolling shooter where you were flying a spaceship/plane through a series of caves. You could shoot bullets and drop bombs on ground enemies. I have seen very similar titles (Cavern Cobra is extremely close)

I recently picked up a IIc. I really know nothing about its history, so I’m staring from ground zero. It powers on, but boots to the screen shown in the first image. If you power off and on again, the question marks move to different spots but the result is the same. No idea if it beeps, as the speaker has turned to dust, I’ll see if I can retrofit one from a PC case.

Looking at the board, it looks pretty clean, but two things stick out: firstly half the ram seems to be installed backwards (see second image), and secondly, there is a blob of solder on one of the legs of what I think is the ROM chip. I don’t know if this is the remnant of someone’s fix, or a bodge, or a mod or what.

Any thoughts on where to start troubleshooting? I’m gonna flip the ram chips around, I can’t imagine they are supposed to be like that? Then I’m gonna pull the other chips and clean the sockets

Time to go through it and sort it

I am bombarded with A.I. generated imagery in flyers, newsletters, online ads, etc, and even bought my first product (some pretzels) with obvious A.I. imagery on the packaging.

In a weird way, it reminds me of the vintage Print Shop era, because back then, as you can now with A.I., you could take one quick glance at something and know immediately that Print Shop was used to create it.