The Brad Hole

With Apple's 30th anniversary back on April 1st (and my near birthday), I made it my quest to obtain an Apple ///, more for curiosity and trivia purposes than anything else. When I discovered there was an Apple ///+ shortly thereafter, I put out feelers for one of those as well. The Apple /// itself had a pretty low production run, but the ///+ was exceedingly rare. As fate would have it, I was able to snag a /// pretty easily, and landed a ///+ out of sheer blind luck. Unfortunately, I'm still on the prowl for software for the ///, so I haven't been able to do much with it other than turn it on and stare at the screen, which says "READY". It doesn't have an internal monitor ROM like the Apple II (that I can tell) so it's fairly useless without software. Oh well.

While hunting, I discovered the thrill of old Apple II and Mac software. For example, I did not realize that Wizardry 1 and Epyx's Winter Games were even made for the Mac. I've also been excited to lay my hands on a bunch of original, but very old, Apple II games. One of the sad legacies of computing in the 80's is the widespread piracy. It was so bad that many disk archives existing today, at least for the Apple II, are of pirated versions of games complete with crack screens. I hope to start dumping some of the original disks soon - truly for archival purposes. The MAME project (of which I'm a proud participant) has been very good about cataloging and tracking arcade game ROMs. Sadly, computer systems have had it much harder when it comes to archiving. Many of the disks are copy-protected. Most can be reproduced with a nibble disk format, but some will require a new format. I can feel an Apple II emulator trying to burst free from inside, so I'm hoping to wrap up my current affairs in MAME and MESS fairly quickly so I can give this a shot.

In years past, I was able to dump disk images by using a Mac LC with an Apple IIe card with an attached 5.25" floppy drive. The Apple II disks could then be dumped to a ProDOS partition on the Mac and easily copied from there. I'll have to set up the LC again; the battery is dead and that model requires a good battery to boot. I'm also not sure yet how I'm going to get the data off the Macs once they are dumped. In years past, I just used a HFS-formatted 3.5" floppy to transfer to a current Mac, but even now 3.5" floppies have gone the way of the dodo. I can't easily network that Mac because the IIe card takes up the slot used by the Ethernet card. I suppose I could dump a bunch, then swap out the cards; we'll see. It'll definitely be a culture shock to use System 7.1 again, that's for sure. And I'll have to figure out how those stupid Mac-to-VGA dongles work again so I can hook up a monitor to the LC.

All in all, I'm having a great deal of fun with this vintage software and I'm looking forward to messing with it a lot more. Does anyone reading this know the fascinating secret of the Apple II Video Overlay Card? I'll spill on that in my next entry, provided our pool doesn't flood, a dog doesn't get crippled or we don't unearth an Indian burial ground in our backyard.