Show #6 (July 2011): User groups, Beautiful Boot, KFest memories, and game tournaments

This month in Open Apple, Mike and Ken share the studio for a one-on-one recording session. We look at user groups, museums, and academic classes that celebrate the Apple II, as well as the growing collection of the Internet Archive, courtesy Jason Scott. While looking forward to next week’s KansasFest convention, memories of previous KFests are unearthed and examined. Unusual Apple II and Apple III machines are hot on eBay, as are the competitors in recent and upcoming arcade tournaments. And let’s not overlook the gauntlet that Richard Garriott has thrown down over the future of the Ultima franchise.

Congratulations to Alex Lee, who named the game as DuelTris! He won a $20 credit to the RetroFloppy store, courtesy David Schmidt. Next month’s winner gets a three-issue hardcopy collection of 300 Baud magazine.

Click past the jump for links mentioned in this episode.

Introduction (0:00 – 12:58)

• Thomas Compter’s homepage
• NAUG’s AppleWorks Forum scans
• Andy Molloy’s homepage
• Denver Apple Pi
• Gamebits, Ken’s defunct gaming column
• Done the Impossible

II News (12:59 – 54:24)

• Seattle Retro-Computing Society
• Commodore Computer Club’s trip to the SRCS
• Photos from the Living Computer Museum
• Computer History Museum on Facebook
• This Day in History
• CS 185C: History of Computing
• San José State University class audit form
• Computist on the Internet Archive
• Why Jason Scott put Computist on Archive.org
• The GET LAMP Interview Archives
• BBS Documentaries
• “Yes.“
• 6502 vs. 8088
• Machine Project’s Aple II concert
• Video of the Apple II concert
• Bill Fickas’ Guitarple for ALF Products, Inc.
• LoadingReadyRun’s CheckPoint
• Square Enix to release a chiptune album
• Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers (video demo)
• “A Simple Text File” by Man or Astro-man?
• Music Construction Set YouTube playlist (hat tip: Reddit)
• Matthew Pearce’s stock footage under Creative Commons
• CNBC Titans: Steve Jobs
• Mini-Appler reflects on Beautiful Boot
• Beautiful Boot source code
• Apple’s 10 worst products ever (hat tip: 8Bit Aficionado)
• Smartport Virtual Hard Drive
• Rich Dreher’s CFFA3000
• ReactiveMicro & UltimateApple2 on hiatus
• Commodore 64 Replica
• Byte relaunches

Retroviews (54:25 – 1:09:01)

• Ken’s report from his first KansasFest
• Silvern Castle
• Maxster v0.79.5, a Napster client designed for HackFest

Apple Pickings (1:09:02 – 1:22:56)

• AppleWorks 4
• 29 Forgotten Realms novels
• Apple II Europlus
• Lisa X/ProFile Hard Drive Emulator
• Focus IDE HD Controller
• SCSI terminator
• James Littlejohn’s 18.75 MHz Applied Engineering Transwarp GS
• Transwarp II
• Apple III

Name the Game (1:22:57 – 1:43:24)

• Classic Apple II game deaths
• The American Classic Arcade Museum at Funspot
• Gamers gather for retro glory in New Hampshire
• World’s largest arcade introduces interactive Wall of Fame
• Pinball tournament at The 1-Up
• Free PC version of Ultima IV (requires DOSBox)
• Does a free Ultima IV herald a new Ultima game?
• Richard Garriott: “Only my team can create the true heir to my previous work.”
• Eamon PC to Inform 6 conversion scripts
• Leigh Alexander’s memories of Colossal Cave
• MCC-216 S-video
• Alex Freed’s Carte Blanche