What is the Apple IIGS Blog

Set Scanners to Stun! Restoring Printed Material for the Apple II

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0200

Hello Apple II and digital restoration fans!

After I first asked around for scans of hardware and publications around July 2007 some of you may have been wondering the last year: what the hell took so long in seeing them on the newly revamped site?

The short answer is this: I take great lengths to ensure that every scan submitted, whether it be a game box, magazine cover or promotional piece is represented as best as possible in high resolution digital form.

Why bother to do this when the images appear in a relatively low resolution on the web site? Well, the impending Apple IIGS coffee table book for one. Print is a very different beast compared to displaying images on a computer monitor. My aim with the book is to produce as high a quality book you’re ever likely to find and to ensure that, the images planned for use need to be of the highest quality. That quality is determined by their resolution, tonal range, colour accuracy and how ‘clean’ the image is from tear marks, scuffs, dust, scratches, finger prints and anything else ‘dirty’ your imagination could conjure.

The beauty of preparing high resolution images in Photoshop, maximising their tonal range, ensuring colours are accurate and applying a lot of cloning and healing brush techniques is that not only will print benefit, the quality of the images on the web site will also gain from each of these techniques. The cleaner the image, the better it will present itself as a lower resolution JPG as JPG compression removes picture information. By maximising best quality to begin with, the removal of picture information won’t be quite as bad when converted to JPG from TIF or PSD formats. Additionally the file size should be improved as well, as with less ‘noise’ the JPG compression will work more efficiently.

These three images show the original scans.

These three 'after' images show the difference in quality after Photoshop retouching.

What comes next is a (more or less) step-by-step approach to how I retouch scanned images in Photoshop.

Last year I bought the mid-range Epson Perfection 4490 Photo flatbed scanner. It can only scan up to just over A4 document size, but to get a model more advanced is in a different price league. It’s proven to be pretty damn good at its job regardless.

Soon after I began scanning each of the magazine covers I owned for A+, InCider, A+/InCider, IIGS Buyers Guide, II Alive and GS+ magazines. Disregarding GS+ (which is a 2 colour production for which I used very different methods of restoration, best left for a future blog) the rest of the magazines are, except for the later II Alive newsletters, full colour. Each of the magazines is wiped with a microfibre cloth to remove anything on the surface that would otherwise scan with the image. Prevention is part of the cure.

I set my scanner to scan at 300 dpi, 100% of its original size at 48 bit colour, resulting in a 16 bits per channel image. This includes extra tonal information that should help in producing a better result for the final restored image. Additionally, I don’t allow the scanner to automatically improve tone or colour – this I do manually in Photoshop.

At this stage of preparing a scan it is very important to set de-screening for which I de-screen for 133lpi (traditionally a common half tone screen resolution used for magazines). What this does is compensate for the rosette pattern inherent in any offset printed material, which subtly blurs the image. The rosette pattern creates the illusion of full colour, which works when seen from a normal reading distance. In reality, ‘full colour’ is only made up of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) each of which are angled at different degrees to each other and in combination with a half tone screen, create the rosette pattern. While this trick works on the human eye it doesn’t work on the scanner and computer that record exactly what’s shown. You want to be able to remove as much of the original rosette pattern as possible because if you’re planning on printing the image again, you don’t want TWO rosette patterns to appear, which destroys the illusion of continuous colour.

I’ve probably now lost half of the reading audience by this point, which is a shame because there’s a lot less technobable when it comes to actually restoring an image.

The image we’re going to retouch is the issue of InCider that introduced the IIGS, with the occasion being made by your favourite geek and mine, Steve Wozniak.

First of all, I like to make sure my scan is straight, that each of the corners of the cover should be 90º angles. Despite best efforts to position the magazine as straight as possible on the glass of the flatbed scanner, it seems ‘straight’ scans are never guaranteed. I found out from scanning all these magazines that the trim of many of them was wildly inaccurate, therefore the original magazine itself doesn’t actually have 90º corners! So we’re going to give them the perfect corners they always deserved. You can also use the ‘Perspective’ feature of the crop tool to compensate for this issue.

Firstly, I find a reference on part of the cover image for something I know should be perpendicular to the top and bottom trimmed edges. In this instance, I’ve picked the baseline of the InCider masthead and the bottom of the red tagline border. With the rule displayed I drag one guideline to the bottom left of the red border and another to the bottom left of the masthead. You can see that the image is angling away from the bottom left of each of the guidelines.

I then rotate the canvas using the ‘Arbitary’ method and try a couple of values to see what best lines up the red border and masthead to the guidelines. It was only 0.3º that made it all the better. That may have then created an issue with the top edge, where you can see it now trails down, but because those areas are flat colours, they are easy to repair.

You can see from this image that my copy of the magazine is covered in scuff and dust marks. Also, the previous owner decided to write his name in ballpoint pen across the front cover.

I use the heal brush, a relatively new tool in Photoshop, to remove each of the undesirable spots. The heal brush works by looking at the surrounding area outside of your brush and then painting inside the size of the brush what the surrounding area looks like. If there’s too much ‘dirt’ in the surrounding area, the heal brush will paint that, so when this occurs, I rely on the tried and tested method of the cloning brush, where you can source any area of the image and paint with that.

The Woz has various points of dirt all over his face and out of respect for the man, I used the heal brush to remove all of it.

Back to the InCider masthead. Because this is another important feature of the cover, I’m going to make an effort getting it right. I end up tracing the masthead using the pen tool resulting in bezier paths outlining the original masthead. This is the most accurate way to make a selection in Photoshop, but requires a bit of time when compared to the magic wand tool. I figure it’s worth the effort because this masthead appears another 30 odd times before it’s updated for the June 1989 issue, so this bezier path outline can be reused for those future issues.

The path can then be converted to a selection, which I then create a new layer for and fill it with any colour. Because the masthead (and the bullet listed articles below) is actually using a fifth metallic ink (no doubt an extra expense to highlight the gravity of the launch of the IIGS), we want to simulate that metallic look without resorting to using a metallic ink (which is impossible for a web image, and not practical cost wise for inclusion in the book). To do this, I’ve added a gradient layer style. The beauty of employing a layer style is that you can continue to tweak its appearance long after you first applied it; it remains live. The custom gradient I create includes several different tones of grey.

For areas I know are flat colour only, I make selections of them using the magic wand. I use the ‘Refine Selection’ option in Photoshop CS3 to smooth over the edges and contract the selection a little from its edge, which helps blend the existing colour to the 100% flat colour about to be added on a separate layer. Using the eye dropper and set to 5 x 5 sample size (to obtain an average of the colour in the surrounding area) I then fill the selection with that colour. Doing this removes any scuff marks in one fell swoop. I apply this method to all areas of flat colour.

Before scanning I tried as carefully as I could to remove the subscription sticker. After it had been there for 21 years, it wasn’t going to go without leaving something of itself stuck to the cover. So that had to be cloned out with the surrounding area. Note the wonderful, solid flat colour of the ‘The New IIGS’ type above it.

With as much of the ‘dirt’ removed either using the healing or cloning brush, it’s time to move on to one of my favourite bits: using ‘Curves’ to improve the tonal range of the image.

When hitting ‘Auto’ in curves what Photoshop does is find the lightest point of the layer you’re currently on (the main scanned image at this point) and makes it white (we’re talking Red = 255, Blue = 255 and Green = 255). At the same time, it finds the darkest point in the image and makes it black (R=0, B=0, G=0) and evenly stretches the tonal range of the image to fit in between white and black. This will almost always improve the image immediately. I like to bump up the midtones just a little after applying auto curves, just to make that image a little lighter (because when the image is ultimately destined for print, it’s not going to appear as bright as it does on a monitor).

Another technique I like to use to improve colour is ‘Selective Colour’. From either the nature of the old printed material itself (going yellow usually), or from the muddyness that dust introduces, or the lack of ability of the scanner, ‘Selective Colour’ can boost the colours closer to their original intention.

For example, if I want to boost yellow within the image, I’d select ‘Yellows’ as the group of colours I want to manipulate. Rather than adding more yellow, I go to its polar opposite, ‘Cyan’ and DECREASE its percentage value. What this usually results in is a stronger less muddied yellow. It’s especially useful when selecting ‘Whites’ as the colour and reducing the ‘Yellows’ for scanned material that’s aged so badly the white paper has started to become yellow.

We’re nearly there. I like to leave this step last after having cleaned up the pixels in our image, improving the tone and boosting the colour. We want to sharpen the image. But of course, after years of using Photoshop, we all know the ‘Sharpen’ filter is highly frowned upon. Instead, we use the ‘Unsharp Mask’ filter. Trust me. I almost always use a radius of 1.0 pixel as anything more the image becomes unnaturally blurry, with 0% threshold. The amount…well, you can use your eye on that. I usually use between 100% and 150% (if your image is at 300dpi) and Photoshop will update your image almost instantly, previewing the effect. Too high an amount and you’ll end up with an unusual halo effect.

But the unsharp mask ends up looking perfect and completes restoration of the magazine cover, just as it appeared in your hot little hands, as you probably waited for it to arrive listening to Cyndi Lauper’s ‘True Colors’, during those halcyon days of October 1986.

So I lied: there was no real short answer. But that’s what’s been involved in restoring, at last count, 30 A+ magazine covers, 8 IIGS Buyer’s Guide covers, 30 InCider covers, 46 InCider/A+ covers and 12 II Alive covers.

Next Time: Using 2 x 1-bit 1200 dpi scans of each colour plate for GS+ magazine cover, adding both plates in InDesign and then exporting them as PDFs.

The Apple IIGS or "It's the Cute Little Flaws that Keep a Guy Interested"

Thu, 01 Feb 2001 00:00:00 +0200

I don't know what it is about me, but I've always backed the underdog. It could be said that the Apple IIGS was such a beast; industry pundits noting only its weak points, meeting with limited success and the machine itself being abandoned by the very company that had produced it.

Click to Enlarge

But the Apple IIGS should have been, but was for too few Apple II users at the time of its release in 1986, the pinnacle of personal computing. It was the latest Apple II, a series of computer that spawned the POPULAR personal computing revolution. Such an accolade should not be taken lightly, especially as we enter the second coming of the PC revolution with consumers clamouring to buy a computer to access the Internet, the result of which is that the computing industry is now undeniably one of the biggest in the world.

Click to Enlarge

The IIGS, as an Apple II, was durably built, expandable and entirely open to software and hardware developers to create a wonderful computing platform. The IIgs could run the thousands of tried and tested Apple II programs that had been written over the past nine years since the Apple II's inception. On top of that, the newer, faster 16-bit processor of the IIGS allowed for more complicated programs to be written. The graphics capability which features included a 320x200 resolution with 16 colours from a palette of 4096 colours (later to be 256 and 3200 colours on screen via software tricks) and a 640x200 resolution with 16 dithered colours allowed for colourful, eye opening graphics, 8-bit programs' graphics paling in comparison. Also new in the IIGS was its potential to create amazing music and sound - fitted with the ensoniq chip, found in synthesisers to generate sound, allowed the GS to be heard in style. So with the strength of the past, the innovation of the (then) present and the potential to realise ideas of the future, what went wrong?

Price? The IIGS cost a bundle. After buying a IIGS with 512k RAM, Apple RGB monitor, 3.5 inch drive, 5.25 inch drive and an ImageWriter II printer, your pockets would be so empty you could fit the whole kit and kaboodle to replace the empty space once filled with your cash. When compared to other similar 16-bit systems of the time, Amiga and Atari ST, it was indeed pricey.

Speed? Not to mention that Amiga and Atari ST computers ran at 7Mhz+ stock speed. A IIGS out of the box only runs at 2.8Mhz. Fine for running 8-bit Apple II software, but for native Apple IIGS software it proved not to be so ideal.

Click on each seperate thumbnail to enlarge each image.

At the very least, even if the IIGS wasn't to capture a newer audience with its release, surely veteran Apple II owners, in their tens of thousands, would upgrade to the latest model? Apparently not. Even by February 1990, Incider/A+ Magazine stated in that months editorial that only 38% of its readership owned a IIGS. 50% of readers owned a IIe, 35% owned a IIc/IIc+ and the remaining 9% owned an Apple II+. (I assume those values added together surpassing the 100% is due to the fact that some readers owned more than one type of Apple II.) So why didn't more users upgrade to the IIGS? Who knows. It wasn't all just hype, bells and whistles, the IIGS DID have some substance to it.

What I do know for sure was that the IIGS was the underdog. Is that such a bad thing? It may be said that something good always comes out of something bad. To turn to the more relevant issue of IIGS gaming, I'll begin on that point. Many, many IIGS games found their way onto the market. And many of those games were programmed so well, IIGS users soon became amazed at what COULD be done, despite the technical limitations of the machine (in terms of gaming, 2.8Mhz was seen to define what could or could not be accomplished). For example, how could some IIGS versions of games be better than the Amiga counterparts, when the Amiga ran over twice as fast and had a chipset handling fast,animated graphics found in games? Or being able to use 3200 colours on screen when Apple Computer themselves said the machine could only display 16 colours? So surely using a computer, where the "impossible" IS accomplished, against all odds, against what everybody else tells you, attains some sort of magic about it. A magic that simply can't be found on a computer running at whatever speed it runs at to accomplish anything. How boring that would be. But that's not to say that others don't feel the same magic for the computers they may have used for the past 20 years, but it's how I feel about the IIGS. That is why I have devoted this page to emulating the Apple IIGS. Emulation is the best way that we can guarantee to store and relive old memories, put the platform wars of last decade aside, and enjoy each older computer platforms for what they were. With that said, enjoy the page...

The Book of the Website

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0200

At the same time as I’ve been collating and preparing the new ‘What is the Apple IIGS?’ website I’ve also been preparing a coffee table book of the same title.

My aim is that it will be the most comprehensive visual history of any Apple computer, including its dedicated software, hardware, periodicals and books, honouring the work of everyone who made the platform a joy to use.

I intend the book to be of premium quality, using my skills as a professional graphic designer. I hope that this recorded slice of Apple history will be as good, if not better than the existing books ‘Apple Design: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group’ and ‘Apple T Shirts’.

To give you more of an idea, this is what the book WON’T be:

1) It will include a brief introductory chapter dedicated to the 8-bit Apple II, but the book will not focus on the fact the IIGS can run 8-bit software. Covering the 8-bit Apple II would require an effort ten times that of which is already required to produce a book dedicated to IIGS specific products.

2) Too text heavy. As a coffee table book, text will be kept to a minimum with only introductions being made to different facets of the IIGS. The pictures will speak louder than words.

This is a project I have been doing in my spare time, simply because I love doing it. The book may take another 12 months, 2 years… or even longer to complete (I hope not, for my own sanity). Currently, I have no set deadline, as visual assets are still being collected then retouched within Photoshop. Such a time will come however when no more material will be collected and final layouts will be produced.

Of course, one sure fire way the book can get into everyone's hands faster is if you’re able to contribute to the site. Check out the 'You Can Help' section, or as you browse each archive, you can see which elements are missing for which you might be able to fill in.

If you’re curious about such a book, email me with your interest! This will encourage me on! Don’t think of this as a pre-order, merely your expression of interest. I’m sure I’ll take pre-orders when I know when the final book is printed and ready to ship.

- Alex

Game Interpreters: an Adventure in Themselves?

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0200

What a bumper year it's been for IIGS hardware: The custom built IIGS portable, version 2.0 of the CFFA card (review coming soon!) and the updated Focus Controller and Sirius RAM by Tony Diaz. It's certainly felt there's been a resurgence of interest for the IIGS in 2008.

By comparison however, new software is lacking. What I'm going to propose may sound preposterous, but I'm going to put it out there anyway, for the truly adventurous at heart.

Recently, I became aware of adventure game interpreters. Unlike emulators, which reverse engineer an entire computer platform allowing you to use, for example, Apple IIGS software on Mac OS X thanks to Sweet 16, game interpreters have reverse engineered the game engine, so that the data files of original games can be utilised just as they were originally utilised by their executable files for the platforms they were originally written (DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, etc).

The advantage of an interpreter is that you only need the processing, memory and display resources to play the game, not an entire system. The disadvantage is that you need to reverse engineer multiple interpreters to play the games.

But perhaps making a game interpreter for the IIGS makes the result of development kill 5 birds with one stone. Let me explain.

Successful game design not only requires the talents of programmers, artists, musicians, but also someone who designs the game itself - the story, goals, gameplay and so on. Given that all four types of people aren't exactly numerous nor have a lot of spare time on their hands for the IIGS these days, a team consisting solely of programmers to make an interpreter could be possibly be a better idea, and the skills of graphics, musicians and game designers are already utilised within the games that are suited for play on the IIGS.

SCUMM VM is the most popular open source game interpreter project, which allows play of Lucas Arts' back catalogue of adventure games that use the SCUMM engine ("Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion") such as Loom and Monkey Island. SCUMM VM can play the original games from any platform: DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, etc) on modern computers running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. All SCUMM VM needs are the data files associated with each game.

While SCUMM VM has been developed to be portable, there's no way we're going to get C++ code to compile on the IIGS. Even if we could, I'm sure the IIGS couldn't execute the program fast enough for an enjoyable experience anyway.

However, this is what I propose - SCUMM VM has a comprehensive Wiki that includes information on how SCUMM, the original game engine Lucas Arts created to aid development of their games, works from its scripting all the way to the compression algorithms used for graphic backgrounds and objects. The Wiki also includes an active developer forum and I'm sure they'd be quite interested in hearing about such an unusual project such as getting SCUMM games to work for the Apple IIGS.

If (and it's still a big if) with this help at hand, custom code could be specifically written for the IIGS. Most likely it would require assembly language for speed and memory efficiency, but if successful, the IIGS could recognise the data resources from a selection of those games and run them using a native SCUMM framework. So hopefully instead of porting ONE game to the IIGS, you will have ported FIVE games to the IIGS in one go.

If you haven't already shrugged off the idea, let's theorise about what would be the easiest approach to implement it.

The first choice might be to decide which SCUMM games the IIGS could handle, based on their graphics (after all, there's no point trying to get 'Full Throttle' working on the IIGS when it uses 256 colours and full screen animation!) The first five SCUMM games:

'Maniac Mansion'...

'Zak McKraken and the Alien Mind Benders'...

'Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade'...

'Loom'...

'The Secret of Monkey Island'...

are feasible for play on the IIGS, based on their graphics. Additionally, the audio of any of those games could be handled by the IIGS without problems.

Secondly, which version (or versions) would be most appropriate to try to get working on the IIGS? For example, the DOS EGA, Amiga and Atari ST versions of the first four games all share exactly the same graphics resources, that is, 16 colour EGA graphics, which the IIGS can handle without breaking a sweat.

But which would be best suited in regards to audio for the IIGS? The Atari ST version has the weakest audio based on its limited hardware, but perhaps that would be the easiest to implement on the IIGS? The DOS versions utilise the early sound cards made by Creative Labs and Roland, which basically play MIDI data. Perhaps the music could be output from the IIGS using the SynthLab tool (Tool 35)? The DOS versions didn't include digitised sound effects either - sound effects were achieved by using the instruments built into the sound cards, which again could be potentially achieved on the IIGS the same way as the music.

The Amiga versions of these games used sampled instruments and four channel sound, again something the IIGS could handle, but possibly more difficult to implement than the DOS versions.

Dilemma and Digression

With 'The Secret of Monkey Island' it gets trickier to decide. Because seeing EGA graphics on the IIGS breaks my heart (we all know the IIGS can do better!), this game presents a bit of a dilemma. The Atari ST and DOS EGA versions include EGA graphics that could easily be displayed on the IIGS. However, these graphics don't look as good as previous EGA SCUMM games, because for Monkey Island, Lucas Arts created the graphics with the Amiga in mind, utilising its ability to display 32 colours simultaneously from a palette of 4096 colours. The IIGS can also display 32 colours simultaneously, if they're not all on the same scan line.

This image shows the EGA graphics of Monkey Island. Serviceable, but not as good as it could be.

I have made some graphic tests, having captured many screen shots of the Amiga version of Monkey Island from SCUMM VM and how these graphics may be best converted to the IIGS. Of course, the biggest trick is that the IIGS can only display 16 colours per scan line, so the graphics NEED to be converted specifically for use on the IIGS, using multiple colour palettes to display up to 32 colours.

This is the original Amiga version of two screens, added together in Photoshop.

This is a 16 colour version of the same scene, suitable for the IIGS.

And this is a ‘two palette' version of the same scene, where the image could be made from two 16 colour palettes on the IIGS.

Using Photoshop, I did a test where I edited two screens together (many SCUMM games use horizontal scrolling in individual scenes) from the Amiga version. Using the 'Export to Web' feature of Photoshop, I locked the colours used for the hero, Guybrush Threepwood when downscaling the palette to 16 colours. This is important, as just like traditional animation, you want to keep the colours of your characters consistent across the whole production. By locking those colours, when you convert the image from 32 colours (Although I've found that no more than 25 colours are ever used in the Amiga art) down to IIGS friendly 16 colours, Guybrush looks the same and it's the background colours which will change to try to best match what was present on the Amiga art. The results were actually quite good for this test, but it may vary for other scenes in the game.

Now, that's only using one colour palette. You could use 16 palettes, each using 16 colours on the IIGS, to try to improve what's already looking good for the IIGS. But the problem is this: If Guybrush (or any other character) moves vertically up or down the scene, the changing palette MAY change the character's appearance. However, the vertical positions of characters are limited, and additional colour palettes should only be used in areas where characters cannot roam (and if an extra palette won't create a noticeable 'banding' effect).

Now, I'd be more than happy to prepare the best possible IIGS graphics using Photoshop, saving to GIF, then converting them to a native IIGS picture format with multiple palettes using Super Convert, Convert 3200 or Prism, IF these graphics can be utilised. Because this method results in a IIGS specific graphic format, this will require more customised code in a IIGS SCUMM implementation, making it more difficult to realise.

What's easier, but more ugly, would simply be to use the graphics from the DOS EGA version. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is probably pushing the multipalette idea too much; the Amiga version's visuals didn't fare as well as Monkey Island, being downscaled to 32 colours from 256 colours.

Amiga Screenshot of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

Getting back to Reality...or at least, more feasible dreaming

One final decision that may make SCUMM IIGS easier - would it be better if only the DOS EGA version resources would be used? Or if only the Amiga or Atari ST resources? Because of the differences between the different versions (for sound and music, for example) it's likely that trying to implement different platform versions will require additional work. SCUMM VM doesn't allow mixing and matching of graphics and sound, e.g. the graphics from the DOS EGA version of Monkey Island with the sound of the Amiga version. This could, perhaps, be done for the IIGS given that SCUMM IIGS would need to be written from scratch, but would require more work.

So, to recap, some proposed project goals:

If SCUMM IIGS aimed to utilise resources from any version of existing SCUMM games, it would probably make the most sense to do so from the DOS EGA versions. This would include:

Maniac Mansion (DOS v2)
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (EGA)
Loom (EGA)
The Secret of Monkey Island (EGA)

DOS EGA makes sense, because no graphics conversion is required - the IIGS is fully capable to display EGA graphics.

By utilising the DOS versions, you maximise the number of games that all use the same music output method, which may make development easier, with the SynthLab toolset of System 6.

The DOS versions are the most popular and there is more ‘support' for them. For example, SCUMMVM cannot playback the music of the Amiga version of Monkey Island, but playback of music from the EGA version is no problem.

IIGS System Requirements:

Anyone who would love to relive the 80s and play new games on a real IIGS would likely have beefed up systems. So perhaps if we set these realistic IIGS system requirements:

System 6.01
2 to 4 meg of RAM
7Mhz with 8k cache with either TranswarpGS or ZipGSX
Hard Drive or Flash Card volume

Hopefully this strikes a balance between easier development (less optimisation to make it run acceptably on a stock 2.8Mhz IIGS) and available hardware.

Another Catch

There's no legal issue to reverse engineer the SCUMM engine (indeed, the SCUMMVM team has been helped by the original programmers at Lucas Arts to get to the level of quality it has now) however you will need to own a purchased version of each of the Lucas Arts games. Just like collecting Apple II software, you can find these older Lucas Arts games on eBay and other online stores.

This, however, also lends itself to an advantage - different language versions were sold (French and German), for which if you have the data files of, you can switch them for the English versions for play in those languages without any additional work, because it's already supported in SCUMM.

In Conclusion

So, a pipedream or a IIGS gaming project challenge for the truly adventurous? Let the discussion begin!

'AMay' Answers an Apple II Creative Mayday

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0200

Upon reflection, one of the many things I enjoyed about the IIGS back in 1987 as an impressionable 11 year old was not having one. That's right - the wait itself, although painful at the time, was made thrilling knowing this was the computer we were going to get after visiting the local Apple Centre and seeing various ‘multimedia' examples of what the machine was capable of.

When I say multimedia, I don't mean the ‘Demo Scene'. Although, of course, I wet my pants when I saw the FTA's Nucleus Demo in 1989 and subsequent FTA productions resulted in similarly soaked responses. Nor do I mean stacks made with Hyperstudio or Hypercard, which were also yet to come.

No, I mean early encounters with the IIGS Sales Demo, seeing Paintworks Plus in use and then printing digitised imagery that was then proudly stuck to the wall behind the IIGS on display or Music Contruction Set playing some tunes with those sexy matching Bose Roommate speakers.

And also: Fantavision. Even if I only saw screen grabs of this program in Broderbund catalogues, I was excited by this program's ability to create animation with graphics equal to what I was playing in arcades at the time.

It wouldn't be until 1992 that I got a copy of Fantavision (a very cheap teachers edition with 5 disk based copies of the program) and despite loving what the program was capable of, I didn't find the interface as intuitive as I wanted to creating animation myself.

Which is probably all the more reason I'm overjoyed by fellow Australian Wade Clarke's work as one- man music outfit ‘Aeriae'. Wade has created a four and a half minute animation predominantly created with the 8-bit Apple II version of Fantavision as a video clip to accompany his track ‘AMay'. The clip deals with growing up, school, work and death and I relate to my own childhood more through the polygonal characters using the standard hi-res colour palette than most other music clips exploring similar themes. This is exactly the kind of epic work that actually lived up to my expectations, set by those early multimedia encounters, of what I hoped could be done with an Apple IIGS.

The complexity of the clip must certainly be the largest and most complex animation ever seen in the 8-bit version of Fantavision and that's a feat in itself. The way it's been cut with Final Cut Pro and synced to the music...I simply love it. I hope to see more of this kind of work, where creative professionals today turn back to the computers of their childhood to power their creative output. Wade's even included an overview as to how he spent over four months creating the clip on his own.

Hopefully the buck won't stop with creative video based works either. With chip tunes becoming de rigor in electronic music circles, I'm hoping one day to hear the wave table synthesis of the Ensoniq sequenced on a IIGS and heard among the likes of the C64's distinctive SID chip as well as the Gameboy's idiosyncratic tones.

CFFA Card Review

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0200

I'll admit it: I'm no expert with hardware. While many Apple II faithful are handy with a soldering iron and can boast to have modified their TranswarpGS or ZipGSX beyond their default clock rate, I'm very cautious with anything that's green with gold teeth. Additionally, having never upgraded my Vulcan hard drive before moving onto a Power Mac, I've never used SCSI (similar to the CFFA in some respects) on the IIGS and with it, setting up and managing multiple 32meg ProDOS partitions.

To that end, my review of Rich Dreher's CFFA card will contain a step by step guide as to how I set it up on my ROM 01 IIGS with 4 meg of RAM and 8Mhz ZipGSX. My steps are the result of playing around with the card for quite a few hours in tandem with reading the accompanying CFFA manual. Hopefully, the solutions I found are going to be the same sort of issues other more non-technically minded people will encounter and hopefully encourage the curious to put down some hard earned cash into Flash based storage for the Apple II.

Because it's fantastic!

1. Hardware Install

Was a snap and didn't require anything more than fitting the card into one of the IIGS' spare slots.

However, I originally installed the CFFA in slot 2; not so ideal if your IIGS battery RAM is dead, as getting the IIGS to see the CFFA requires you to access the control panel and switch Slot 2 to 'Your Card' every time I turned on the damn thing!

Slot 7 was also free so I inserted the CFFA into that physical slot. Not requiring AppleTalk for the moment and the control panel setting for Slot 7's default being ‘Your Card' results in the IIGS booting from the compact flash even when freshly turned on with all its BRAM parameters back to defaults, which includes scanning all slots to look for a disk to boot from.

You can, of course, get your IIGS battery RAM replaced for both ROM 01 and ROM 03 machines and not worry about those issues, but will require some hardware know-how to fix for yourself.

2. Software Install

Batch/Run 6 of the CFFA included a free 16 meg compact flash card preinstalled with ProDOS 8 and some important utilities for setting up your CFFA. These programs are also available on the accompanying CD-ROM, as well as online. I copied these utilities from the 16meg card to a floppy disk containing System 5.0.4. Booting from this floppy, I can run the utilities from the 3.5" disk, enabling me to remove the 16 meg compact flash, replacing it with the 256 meg Compact Flash I had eagerly bought a month earlier for only $5 Australian.

3. Setting Up Partitions with the CFFA Utility Program

The next step was to use the CFFA Utility program to specify how many partitions I wanted to use. With a 256 megabyte compact flash card, dividing 256 meg by 32 meg equals 8 partitions. ProDOS can only support volumes or partitions as large as 32 meg, so this process is necessary (unless you format the drive with HFS, which limits the compact flash card's contents accessibility to System 6 only).

Originally, I didn't appreciate the process whereby you need to specify how many partitions you want to use and so I started using the CFFA using only the default four partitions (and wondered why only four appeared when I have a 256 meg compact flash!). After setting the partitions setting to 8, I powered off my IIGS and powered back up again, revealing the 8 partitions.

4. Formatting ProDOS Partitions

Once you've specified how many partitions you intend to use, you then need to PROPERLY format them for use with ProDOS. And I don't just mean using the GS/OS Finder.

The CFFA manual states that you should use Davex (a freeware program written by Dave Lyons) to properly format your compact flash card's first two 'higher' partitions. Apparently the Apple System Utils has a bug that doesn't properly format any of the partitions after the second one of the compact flash card.

Now, I know how to use a IIGS pretty well, but Davex didn't come to me naturally. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but it was probably only in 2003 that I learned you could type 'bye' in BASIC to return to GS/OS or ProDOS. Before that I used a hasty three-finger salute.

In my defense however, I'd used a little command line stuff with UNIX, so how hard could Davex be? If you type '?' into the program, it displays a list of the commands available. But none of them seemed relevant to formatting a disk. I found the documentation for Davex online which pointed me in the right direction. Turns out the 'init' command (initialise) is an external one and doesn't appear when using the '?' command. The other command useful here: 'online', shows where these pre-allocated unformatted partitions are in terms of the device and drive number. By typing the command 'init .71 /CF1' you specify to initialise the first partition of the drive found in slot 7 and calling that partition 'CF1'. By typing the command 'init .72 /CF2', you do the same for the second partition.

Now, booting off the System 5.04 floppy, the other partitions can be seen. Because I had tried formatting all partitions previously with System 5.0.4 instead of Davex, sure enough, one of the partitions (partition 4) would only format to 21 meg instead of 32 meg, which the CFFA documentation warned would happen if you formatted without Davex.

Once you've correctly formatted the first two partitions with Davex, you can re-initialise any partitions with the wrong size with System 5.0.4 and they will then be 32 meg in capacity, except the last partition I had, which I'm assuming is because 256 divided by 8 equals 32 only in a perfect world, so I'm losing a little space somewhere as part of the formatting required (in the same way a 20 gig iPod will only actually be able to store 18.4 gig when formatted). But that doesn't bother me, because now I've got a solid-state hard drive with 245 megabytes available for the Apple IIGS.

5. Using Cider Press

Now that my partitions have been correctly created on the compact flash, I'm ready to copy across the data that I've set up in 32 meg partitions within 2image disk images on my PowerMac using Bernie ][ the Rescue.

But to do so, I have to go out of my Mac comfort zone and use a PC. Andy McFadyn's Cider Press is a wonderful utility that very quickly copies data to and from ProDOS partitions in Microsoft Windows. Not only is Cider Press free, its source code is now also available. However no one has taken up the challenge of porting it to Mac OS X.

So getting my data to and from my primary Mac to my IIGS, I have to use the extra step of utilising my girlfriend's Dell laptop connected to a USB based compact flash card reader. Not so ideal, because if I want to then transfer data back from my IIGS to my Mac, I have to go through the PC again.

According to Rich on the CFFA forum, Dave Lyons is in the process of creating a utility for Mac OS X that will allow copying of ProDOS partitions to and from a compact flash card on the Mac. Bring it on I say, but at the same time, a Mac OS X port of Cider Press wouldn't go astray either.

6. Enjoying the CFFA Card

Booting into System 6.0.1, with a fairly standard set of extensions (Sound Control panel and a few desk accessories) takes about 45 seconds to cold boot to the desktop. About 10 of those seconds are caused by the slight delay of each partition literally appearing on the desktop. I'm not sure why this is occurring, and unfortunately, this process repeats whenever you quit any program and return to the Finder.

Just testing the loading times of games at random, Milestones 2000 v1.5 opens in 8 seconds. Duel Tris requires 10 seconds to arrive at its main menu. Arkanoid requires 19 seconds to reveal its animated Taito logo.

It would help to have a comparison to truly show the meaning behind these times, but unfortunately my Vulcan drive has since expired. I think I can say however, that these loading times are much faster than my Vulcan ever was.

In chatting with Mike Stephens during one of the Aussie Friday IRC sessions, he felt that the older v1.3 firmware, when used in conjunction with Dave Lyons GS/OS driver, yielded better speeds. While you can downgrade your CFFA card's firmware to v1.3, I'm happy with the convenience that firmware v2.0 offers, in that you don't need to set any jumper settings for the number of partitions you use. Additionally, you can specify which partition to boot from simply holding down the 'M' key upon reset of your IIGS.

Rich Dreher has stated on the forums that Dave Lyons is working on an updated GS/OS driver to accommodate version 2.0 firmware of the CFFA, which may yield further speed improvements.

Speed Isn't Everything

It's really nice to use a real IIGS again with a mass storage device. In the last ten years a lot of my IIGS experience has come from Bernie ][ the Rescue, mainly because of its speed and quick access to the Apple IIGS software library via the use of disk images. Of course, Bernie isn't 100% compatible with every piece of IIGS software but going back to a real IIGS, with the speed limitations of 3.5" floppies and Vulcan hard drives, was never an entirely desirable prospect. The CFFA has changed that for me. While speed is great, convenience is king: being able to store 245meg versus the 40 meg on the Vulcan is a wonderful luxury. Additionally, the other advantage of the CFFA is that there are no moving parts - you're never likely to lose data due to physical defects in the media and it makes no noise whatsoever when the compact flash card is accessed.

Wish List

If ever version a v3.0 firmware was released what I'd like to see most is the CFFA card being used as a virtual 3.5" floppy drive which emulates the IWM. The idea occurred to me when details of the BlueFlash project were revealed - the idea that you can store disk images on the compact flash card, which you would specify to use via some sort of user interface, for example a classic desk accessory, and then boot those images. This intended feature of the BlueFlash card is great for maintaining a way of playing all those 5.25" disk based games for which you simply can't copy to 32 meg ProDOS partitions on a compact flash card. If a future version of the CFFA (or another product) could do the same for 3.5" 2image archives, we can ensure that not only hard drive installable programs work, but programs that only work from floppy disk (of which there are many games, apps and educational programs that refuse to run from anything but a 3.5" disk) can continue to be run long after the physical media or drive mechanisms fail.

Additionally, something I'd like to see in any compact flash card reader for the Apple II is the ability to insert the card through the hole on the back of the computer. At the moment, to insert a compact flash card means I have to unplug the monitor from the IIGS, remove it from its position atop the CPU, open the IIGS case, insert the card, then put everything back together again. Some will see this as nitpicking, but it is a bit of a pain.

Mauro has put together a hack and shared his setup with photos on the CFFA forum. But I'd rather not have to file one of the holes at the back of the IIGS case to make this work.

Alternatively you can get a one channel 40 pin IDE connector cable and have two compact flash cards connected concurrently, or at least just plug the card to the external cable for simpler access. I want to try this for myself at some point, but a lack of time and other projects for this site beckon.

Overall: Speed and Convenience...

...make the CFFA card a real winner. But you still have to take the time to prepare those 32 meg ProDOS partitions to copy over to the compact flash card. This is a time consuming process, but I'm going to eliminate that part for you long suffering readers, by providing the 2images I used to get the CFFA up and running for myself.

This includes the following 32 meg 2images, checked for integrity with the latest version of Prosel 16:

A System 6.0.1 install, updated with GUPP v1.06, Tool 34 update from Brutal Deluxe and the HFS patch, with every System Tool and font required for almost every IIGS program and to top it off every shareware and freeware game imaginable (let me know if I've missed anything!).

The same System 6.0.1 install with every shareware and freeware game, but also loaded with Taifun Boot v1.7, which will allow you to also boot into System 5.0.4, System 4, System 3.2 and ProDOS v2.0.3. Unfortunately, this will only work with ROM 01 IIGSs, as Taifun Boot will not work with ROM 03 machines. If you can get Taifun Boot to work on ROM 03 machines, let me know!

Action Games (16.2meg)

Adventure and Simulation Games (19.5meg)

Board Games and RPGs (15.4meg)

Sports & Unreleased Games (8.3 meg)

Productivity & Visual Creative (both commercial software and shareware and freeware - 13.9meg)

Utilities & Aural Creative (both commercial and shareware, featuring a tonne of SoundSmith tracks and a few of my favourite MODs - 13.8meg)

Reading, Writing and Mathematics (Educational software - 15meg)

And the rest of hard drive installable educational software (10.4meg)

Now these 32meg volumes aren't entirely complete when it comes to hard drive installable versions. If you come across a version of a game on these 2images that don't work or aren't included, and you already have a hard drive installable version, feel very free to upload it!

Feedback

If I've done anything wrong or downright stupid in the way I've setup my CFFA, let me know via the comments available on this blog so we can all benefit from everyone's experience!