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Professional Desktop Publishing and the Apple II

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0200

Growing up, I loved Apple II magazines A+, InCider, Nibble and the Apple IIGS Buyers Guide.

They were all very well produced, intensely professional publications. They mirrored the high visual standard set by Apple with fantastic product photography, terrific typography and clever copy. I was excited to come across any new issue of the aforementioned magazines - they weren't always easy to come by in my relatively small hometown of Newcastle, Australia.

In more recent years, now that I'm a practising graphic designer for both print and digital formats, I still marvel at these magazines; how on earth did they produce these elegant publications without the use of digital technology?

Roger Goode, quite out of the blue, has answered some of these questions for me when he recently wrote into ‘What is the Apple IIGS?'. Roger worked at IDG, the company that published InCider (and later, InCider/A+); I'll let him explain the rest:

"I got my start in publishing by being hired on AmigaWorld magazine (also published by the group that did InCider). I was hired mostly to create graphics with the Amiga for the magazine. But that alone wouldn't justify my hire. So they also made me a designer. In both cases--using the computer to create graphics, and doing magazine design--I was a complete novice. My background was fine art (oil painting). But this company was an outlier of IDG, based in Massachusetts, and they hired a lot of people with marginal skills and just let 'em learn. It was a great environment."

I'd visited Roger's self promotion web site and went immediately to his portfolio and his resume. When I came upon his summary of his time working on InCider, I was in awe. Roger had led them them from traditional paste-ups to the new digital age!

For me, I'd never designed before the Mac, Adobe and Quark came along. So I asked Roger: how the hell did you layout magazines before that?

"...I learned to do magazine design--old school--just a few years before the advent of desktop publishing. Basically the process was all paste-up and mechanical... Meaning that we had boards--pre-formatted paper sheets for a magazine spread--with pale blue grids on them.

Then we would decide on the column count for an article and order the (final edited) copy from the typesetting department. They would send us paper galleys of the copy, set at the right width, and then we'd run it through a waxing machine which applied a thin coat of wax to the back of the paper.

With X-acto knives and T-squares, we would then cut up the galleys, and combined with waxed photocopies of whatever artwork was going on the page, we'd carefully paste down the copy and art to layout the page. Sometimes edits would need to be made, or other adjustments, and we'd have to laboriously cut up the copy--sometimes line-by-line--and move it around to copyfit. If it got too badly sliced and diced, we'd order new galleys and re-paste it based on the last version we'd have on the board.

The old school way.

When everything was finally in place and approved, we'd send the finished board back to typesetting to generate new galleys in finished form in better "resolution" on better paper. All of this was in black and white, so finally we'd have to put a tracing-paper overlay on top of the board and mark that up with handwritten notes to indicate where there was color, and other printing notes. That is what would be sent to be transferred photographically to plates for printing. It's hard to imagine how laborious and time-consuming all that was in retrospect."

Knowing full well myself that it takes some persuading just to change one from one digital workflow to another, never mind analogue to digital, how did the step up to a digital workflow go?

"When the company was first considering moving to desktop publishing on a Mac, the decision was made that InCider would be the first magazine in the group to take the plunge. The Art Director at the time was going to be going on maternity leave, and was also nervous about having to learn to use the new technology. So they started searching for a new Art Director to be the guinea pig. Since I had already grown comfortable using a computer on the Amiga, and they weren't finding any takers among the established Art Directors, I got the job... sort of by default.

Spot the difference? From cut and paste to digital layout

It was an amazing opportunity. Both to be on the leading edge of a new publishing model, and to leap into the role of Art Director... Something that might have taken years for me to move up to otherwise. So I jumped in with both feet. For the next few months, I practically lived in my new office. One of the goals for the initial rollout of the new model was that it be undetectable... meaning that they didn't want anyone to see any difference between the last issue and the new desktop published one, at least not typographically. So all of the typesetting had to look the same.

A layout from the Nov 89 issue – the last to use traditional layout techniques.

I had one of the old typesetters in my office constantly--teaching me the ins and outs of setting and matching type. But it was all being done on this new platform, where the software (QuarkXPress) was relatively new and the options were much more limited than they are today. I'd have to say that it was a good thing that I didn't really know what I was getting myself into when I threw my hat in. The process was nightmarish at times and the deadline set by the company was coming up too fast.

But we pulled it off in the end... I don't think anyone really noticed any changes in the printed copies--except for the note in the Editorial that issue. (I can't remember which issue that was now) After that, it continued to be a fairly steep learning curve, but the worst was over and all the rest was actually a lot of fun, learning new tricks and having so much more control of all the elements in the page design. The only sad part is that--over time--a lot of people started losing their jobs, as more and more disciplines started be concentrated into one job of Desktop Publisher. Typesetting, Production, Stat Room, all these different jobs started to fall by the wayside."

A layout done with Quark Xpress, from InCider/A+ issue Dec 1990

And there you have it - a great account of how it was done in the old days and how quickly all the laborious elements of a job can be rid of almost overnight...as well as the livelihood of working professionals practising traditional methods. We seem to be entering a similarly new phase with this now, with Apple having changed the nature of buying music (and to lesser extents movies and TV) and their new push into education, textbooks and books in general. It's sometimes hard keeping up.

A Dream Comes True! IIGS Users Unite in Paris!

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 15:30:00 +0200

I loved the 1990 California Demo by Mr Z and the FTA, which told the story of their visit to California - meeting the late Joe Kohn who had sung the praises of their work in many an article, as well as meeting the Apple II development team at Apple itself. Digital Exodus' Xmas Demo of 1993 wove a similar tale, only this time it was the convergence of Apple II fans gathering for Apple Expo West 1993. Meeting some of the Apple II elite from France...over fine food and wine, lots of laughs, the occasional language hiccup, and some amazing generosity I can now weave my own tale of how simply having an interest in the Apple II means you automatically have friends all the over the world.

Antoine had arranged as many Apple II fans as were available for my first night in Paris. With my partner Bronwen, Antoine picked us up from Hotel André Gill right in the heart of Montmartre, taking in many of the glittering sights of Paris along the way - although we disappointed Antoine by telling him how we'd seen most of them three years ago or that we'd seen them that very afternoon, after a visit to the Musée d'orsay! Arriving at the restaurant Mathusalem, we sat down and started with Bordeaux wine (the region made famous not only for wines but also for being the birthplace of Antoine)!

We were then joined by Jean-Pierre Lagrange, longtime Apple II fan, whiz and webmaster of Hackzapple and as we started to chat, it started a trend that made it clear that everyone's English was much better than my French...including Bronwen's! Fashionably late was François Michaud, who marked the occasion by providing all attendees of the dinner with a beautifully finished wooden Apple logo (see below). Une telle générosité! Not only that, but drawing from his incredibly impressive collection, François also bestowed me with an amazing A1 sized print reproduction of an original Apple IIGS poster used to promote the machine in France shortly after its release.

At this point, I have a confession to make: there are actually things I love more than the Apple II: chiefly, food. I was not disappointed by the French onion soup (which in France, is strangely simplified by calling it ‘onion soup') and then the AAAAA chitterling sausage was a new contender for my favourite meat left-over ensemble (it's a strong contending crowd with some other hot runners being some incredible sausages I ate in Bremen, Germany and Scotland's national dish, Haggis). For dessert, I shared a café gourmond with Bron, just leaving the coffee all to her (I'm not a big coffee drinker).

The conversation naturally drifted towards our Apple II collections and François is the undeniable hoarding champion at around 485 Apple computers in his possession. Not to mention his assortment of other Apple memorabilia, including retail point of sale displays, software, brochures, publications, you name it. Our discussion then lead to how each of our respective partners, knowing full well that my own partner was seated next to me, react to our compulsive stockpiling of vintage Apple hardware...let's just say that all of our better halves are incredibly patient with us! Speaking of which, François's daughter is currently conducting a psychological survey on addiction...but rather than study the addictive effects of drugs or alcohol, she's wanting responses from people addicting to collecting Apple hardware. Let François know if you'd be interested in partaking!

Time was flying as we were having fun and so the evening came to an unfortunate end. Sleep was becoming a necessary addition to a very full day.

For the following day, Antoine also had a near full itinerary booked. I was to meet him and Paul Lafonta, engineer, creator of many Apple II expansion cards, a real hacker since the early days of Apple, and also close friend to Jean Louis Gassee ;-) Meeting them by the Paris Metro at Alesia, Paul's laboratory was nearby and we went in to see it - it was an incredible monument to vintage Apple hardware...literally, almost a building sized sculpture made from the parts of Apple cases, filed away motherboards, stacked hard drives and lots of miscellaneous vintage computing bric-a-brac. Unfortunately, some of the collection had recently suffered water damage thanks to a leaking ceiling. I hope this fate doesn't await me when I return to Australia and my collection in storage.

With Antoine as chauffeur, we took a pleasant drive out to his home near Versailles on a bright sunny day. In the light-filled living room we sat down and had tea while Antoine added another member to our party - Bill Martens of Call A.P.P.L.E. and Virtual Apple, live from Tokyo, Japan via FaceTime on the iPad 2. We talked about recent collaborations cataloging MECC software but it became too hard not to talk about how Bill was the spitting image of Santa Claus, complete with long beard. Any Japanese kid sitting on his knee would not hesitate to think this was the real Santa. But things had to keep rolling, so we had to bid adieu to Bill and make our way to lunch at Restaurant La villa.

Antoine's longtime programming partner at Brutal Deluxe, Olivier Zardini, was to make an appearance for lunch, but bathroom renovation woes would unfortunately keep him away from our first meeting. However, Antoine informed me that Jean-Pierre Charpentier, better known as Babar St Cyr, would be making an appearance. Antoine knew I was happy about this, as my eyes lit up: I would meet the author of Polysons?!? Incrediblé! Although worrying about speaking in English, Babar needn't have been concerned as again, his English was a lot better than my French! I loved his story of how he met Steve Jobs and got his autograph: Visiting Paris for a NeXT presentation back in the early to mid 90s, Babar waited patiently for Jobs to appear after his presentation and pounced when the man finally appeared. Barbar handed Jobs a print of his NeXT browser new desk accessory for the IIGS and Steve said ‘That's OK, just don't sell it' and then wrote his autograph on it and away he went.

The late Apple CEO was very much on our minds that day, because Antoine was carrying with him a copy of Steve Jobs' biography. Antoine proclaimed, with just a little tongue-in-cheek, that it was the ‘nouvelle bible!' and at various intervals during the day, he would tenderly place it on a table or chair, kneel in front of it and make the sign of the cross.

But back to more important things: lunch. A snifter of sangria made my palette sit up and take notice and for the Basque region inspired cuisine to follow. Not sure how large the choices on the menu would be and seeing they had a selection of tapas, I asked Antoine what the ‘plats' / ‘plages' were and he explained they were a selection of foods on a wooden board. Sounds like an English ploughman's so I ordered the seafood version. It was excellent. It included lovely large anchovies (not of the usual salty variety found on pizzas), a squid's ink calamari, seasoned prawns, a little salad and a salmon mousse accompanied with crusty bread.

Our leisurely lunch continued to talk of past glories on the Apple II, technology and the ugly business side of it all. We made our way back to Antoine's for a full disclosure of his Apple II ‘den'. Multiple IIGS machines adorn the available table spaces. It's always great seeing IIGS like this and these were made all the more exotic with peripherals I don't have, not to mention the French AZERTY keyboards. Antoine showed us some interesting snippets of System 6 source code (complete with interesting stories on the development of GS/OS included with the code itself, including how a single flag made the MS-DOS FST a read-only part of the system when it could have so easily been read and write!) I glanced through all the shelves of books and boxed software just like I might have done as a kid when I visited the local Apple Centre. I wish I'd taken a photo of it, but I did manage to take a photo of the shower in the bathroom next door:

Clearly the sign of another addicted Apple II collector!

Antoine gave me copies of all four volumes of the Apple II: Le Guide, which revealed some French IIGS software I'd never heard of before...damn, more software to find and archive! Really cool, comprehensive listings of IIGS and Apple II software and hardware, although with the added challenge of being in French.

Seeing off Barbar, who technically was illegally parked in front of Antoine's driveway, we then only had time enough for me to show Antoine and Paul a nice selection of visuals I've amassed for the coffee table book as well as some layouts. Over the weekend questions were asked about my book: chiefly what exactly will it be about? It is still dedicated to the IIGS, as I've always originally intended, and I want it to be a complete visual history of the platform - something that IIGS fans can refer to for specific information and that the wider Apple fan community would enjoy to see learning about this unique Apple platform, rather than another resource dedicated to the Macintosh or iOS.

Sadly, it was time to go. Antoine was able to give me a lift back to Concorde, where I caught up with Bronwen again and we explored the Christmas markets leading up to the Champs-Élysées, finding a bite to eat (Tartiflette and a brochette) along the way. The following day we checked out the flea markets and wandered around the magical city.

Much thanks to everyone who came to lunch or dinner (or FaceTime) and extra special thanks to Antoine for organising these Apple II soirees. It's made me keen to catch up with those rare individuals in the UK who still covet Apple IIs, so lookout Drew and Ewen! ;-)

For Home Brew Just Add Hops…Skips, Jumps, Blood, Sweat & Tears

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:30:00 +0200

This article has been written...

a) to help anyone who's interested in Apple IIGS software development (from a complete non-expert)

and

b) to express my jealousy of how the gaming home brew scene on other abandoned platforms is thriving: Space Harrier has been ported to the Atari XL, and as I've been finalising this blog, the Commodore 64 version of Prince of Persia has just been released, made from disassembled code from the original Apple II version and much to the amazement and joy of Jordan Mechner himself! The Retroaction site lists all the new productions coming out for C64, ZX Spectrum and other platforms...and it's a lot.

Perhaps one reason the Apple II has been lagging in this category is that it's incorrectly assumed that everyone within the community already knows what programming languages are available, what toolbox calls can be made, and what visual and audio software can be used to enhance programs. Recently there have been expressions of interest from people new to the IIGS or those who haven't used the IIGS in such a long time, they can't remember all these steps to software development.

Additionally, many developers seem to work in a bubble, with few people being aware of what others are working on. It's always great to receive an enjoyable surprise program, but this could lead to two individuals developing the same program or something similar; a doubling up of efforts that would likely result in one person's effort being made redundant.

Moreover, if the bubble is expanded to other people, enhanced graphics could be employed, sound and music added, further testing done and documentation written in league with the programmer's efforts, hopefully freeing up more time for the programmer who would otherwise take on these peripheral duties themselves.

I know that some people might remember '1WSW' (One World Software Wizards), and I'm really hesitant to even mention it all for fear of the IIGS faithful retreating back into the safety of their secluded individual development. But being included on a list of people, their skills and projects would be purely on a voluntary basis.

For example, I volunteer my services for any IIGS development in the following ways:

• Graphic Design including planning graphical user interfaces, layout & typography. I stress however that this doesn't include illustration, a skill for which I am well out of practise and don't have enough time for to produce work that I'd be happy with. I strongly recommend getting in touch with the artists at Pixel Joint for such work.
• Graphics Conversion (ensuring best possible exploitation of the abilities of the IIGS to display graphics from other formats).
• Beta testing software (albeit via Sweet 16 and KEGS)

If you'd like to make yourself available to help in the development of IIGS software, let me know and in what capacity you're able to assist. I'll add you to this article.

As for developing your own programs, here is a list of the most commonly used software available:

Programming

ORCA/M - Still Sold & Supported with complete documentation - Enables you to develop assembly language based programs. Optional tutorials are available for additional price.

ORCA/C - Still Sold & Supported with complete documentation - Enables you develop in 'C'. Optional tutorials are available for additional price.

ORCA/Pascal - Still Sold & Supported with complete documentation - Enables you to code in Pascal.

Merlin 16+ - Abandonware - Enables you to code in assembly language.

Ninja Force Assembler - Freeware - Enables you to code in assembly language.

Complete Pascal (previously TML Pascal) - Reclassified Freeware - Enables you to code in Pascal and make full use of toolbox calls.

Splat! - Reclassified Freeware - A debugger for use with Complete Pascal.

MICOL Advanced Basic v5.0 - Reclassified Freeware - Extends Applesoft BASIC, exploiting the IIGS more fully.

Iconix & Sonix - Reclassified Freeware - Extends Applesoft BASIC, exploiting the IIGS more fully, specifically in regards to graphics and sound.

Call Box - Reclassified Freeware - Extends Applesoft BASIC, by allowing you to use the IIGS toolbox.

GSoft BASIC - Recently Reclassified Freeware - Allows BASIC to take advantage of IIGS toolbox and other IIGS specific capabilities.

Hyperstudio & HyperCard - adventure style games could be potentially made with either of these hypermedia editing programs.

Foundation & Genesys - Reclassified Freeware - Resource editors to allow you to quickly create the content of pull down menus and program dialogues.

Design Master - Still Sold & Supported - Resource editor to allow you to quickly create the content of pull down menus and program dialogues.

Flaming Bird Disassembler - Freeware - Disassembles compiled assembly code for modification.

Programming Libraries

PegaSoft Draw Tools v3.1 - Shareware - a third party toolset to assist in the display of graphics and animation. Full docs included.

MegaTracker Player v? - Freeware - incredibly optimised code resource for ORCA/M projects that enables SoundSmith sequence playback with only 1 - 3% CPU resources even for a stock standard IIGS.

Tool 219 - Freeware - a system tool developed by the FTA to enable SoundSmith sequence playback.

Tool 220 - Freeware - a system tool developed by the FTA to enable NoiseTracker sequence playback. This only includes MODs from the IIGS version of NoiseTracker, not the Amiga version of NoiseTracker.

ShellPlay - freeware - a shell program to enable very high quality playback of Amiga MOD format music sequences.

Tool 35 - Apple - a system tool included with System 6 for MIDISynth sequence playback. MIDISynth sequence playback requires many more CPU cycles than SoundSmith and is not recommended for arcade games.

Generic Tile Engine - freeware - Still being developed, the GTE enables use of an incredibly quick blitter and tile based scrolling commonly found in arcade games.

Virtual GS – plenty of Pascal and GSoft BASIC examples to help bring you into the world of IIGS programming!

Polymorph's A2 Projects – Mike Stephens' Complete Pascal programs with source code included.

Complete Pascal for the Apple IIGS - Even more info on getting the most out of Pascal development on the IIGS.

Golden Grail – CD-ROM collection put together by Jim Maricondo includes lots of sample code (including the useful music tools listed above).

Graphics Conversion

Convert3200 - Reclassified Freeware - a tool to convert GIF, BMP and IFF formats to the native SHR format of the IIGS in either 16, 256 or 3200 colours. Interface takes getting used to, but provides good and quick results, as well as batch conversions.

Super Convert v4.0 - Abandonware - Converts more formats than any other IIGS program including JPG, GIF, PNG and offers a wide variety of how images are translated for the IIGS. Does the best job of converting artwork to the IIGS' 640 x 200 graphics mode commonly used in desktop applications.

Prism - Abandonware - Simple to use but includes useful options for conversion, Prism can convert images to the native Super HiRes (SHR) graphics with 16, 256 or 3200 colours.

Graphics Creation & Editing

Platinum Paint - Abandonware - Most fully featured 16 colour paint program for the IIGS.

Dream Grafix - Reclassified Freeware - includes best implementation of dealing with images greater than 16 colours.

8/16 Paint - Abandonware - Simple but fast and efficient tool for artwork. Also converts graphics between the different formats supported by the IIGS, including the older 8-bit hi-res and double hi-res graphic modes.

Deluxe Paint II - Abandonware - Classic powerful paint program.

Music Sequencing & Conversion

SoundSmith - Shareware - Tracker style sequencer program that allows compositions of up to 15 tracks with 64k of instrument data. Playback allows plenty of CPU cycles for other tasks.

MODifier - Freeware - Converts older style Amiga MODs such as those created with ProTracker and NoiseTracker to SoundSmith format, also exporting instruments. Note that not all effects of MODs are supported by SoundSmith, for example, pitch bend, but conversion to SoundSmith format will ensure playback will require less CPU overhead.

NoiseTracker - Freeware - FTA developed sequencing program similar to SoundSmith, but breaks the 64k of instrument data barrier. Playback requires more CPU cycles however. NoiseTracker 2 became a desktop based program.

MIDISurgeon v2.0 - Still Sold by Syndicomm as part of GS+ Magazine issue 7, 1 - MIDISurgeon will open standard MIDI files and convert them to IIGS native MIDISynth format. This opens up enormous potential for music on the IIGS.

Audio Editing & Conversion

AudioZap - Reclassified Freeware - Possibly the most powerful audio editing program available for the IIGS. Enables you to open and convert many formats, record with the many different sound expansion cards available for the IIGS, waveform editing and adding effects, and even converting entire disks (not just ProDOS formatted disks either!) to a waveform to search for sound effects or instruments. The program can be found on the Audio & Utilities hard drive image.

I'll update this list whenever anybody makes a suggestion as to what to add.

Projects

This is a list of potential projects or projects already in started by others:

Project	Aims	Status
Magnetic Scrolls Interpreter	Create an interpreter from an existing platform independent program written in C that will allow play of any of the Magnetic Scrolls games including the Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter and make use of the standard IIGS GUI making toolbox calls for pull down menus, dialogues, text rendering, etc. Successful completion of IIGS port of the interpreter will enable 7 new text/graphic adventure games previously unavailable for the IIGS.	All data for games acquired and Antoine Vignau and Olivier Zardini have reverse engineered the format of the graphics, but no further work done.
Level 9 Interpreter	Create an interpreter from an existing platform independent program written in C that will allow play of any of the Magnetic Scrolls games including Scapeghost and Lancelot and make use of the standard IIGS GUI making toolbox calls for pull down menus, dialogues, text rendering, etc. Successful completion of IIGS port of the interpreter will enable multiple new text/graphic adventure games previously unavailable for the IIGS.	All data for games acquired, but no further work done.
Lucas Arts SCUMM & Sierra SCI Interpreters	Using documentation gathered from the SCUMM VM project (which is NOT able to be ported to the IIGS as it's written in C++) to reverse engineer the SCUMM interpreter, write an interpreter in C or assembly specifically for the IIGS. Level of difficulty would be high. Music can be resequenced for the IIGS from the MIDI files found on queststudios.com.	All data files from PC, Amiga and Atari ST versions collected. MIDI files collected and converted to IIGS native MIDI Synth format.
Snatcher	Using HyperCard as a development platform, recreate the Sega Mega CD version of Snatcher for the IIGS, removing some of the game audio, like speech.	Initial work with Michael Shopsin to setup graphics conversion and display of 320 mode graphics within HyperCard.

If you're working on a IIGS game or application, and you'd like to lighten the load, let me know or write in the comments section below. A burden shared is a burden halved!

If you've been following my blogs on 'What is the Apple IIGS?' you'll know I'm not a programmer. I know it's a big ask to anyone who can code on the IIGS, because of the time, effort and brainpower to make it happen. But I know I'm not the only one who'd like to play something new on our favourite Apple II.

System Extensions or 'Create Your Killer GS/OS Environment!'

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:41:00 +0200

Using system extensions is much like a juggling or balancing act - while there are many great ways to enhance GS/OS, you're limited by how much RAM you have, slowdowns, how well each extension gets along with each other and if they were specifically written for the version of the GS operating system you want to use.

Back in the day, I 'only' had 2.25 meg of RAM in my ROM01 IIGS and I thought it was plenty. I played around with quite a few extensions, but ultimately, I liked a lean System 6, as it seemed more stable, saved precious drive space on my 40 meg Vulcan, and left enough memory to play the most demanding game and run the most resource intensive creative apps.

Now of course, emulators make it much easier to play around with your ultimate personal System 6 install, as speed and drive space are many, many more times faster and capacious than back in the '80s and '90s. To enhance GS/OS, open your system folder and copy the individual relevant files from the System Add-ons volume into their respective folders according to what type of system extension they are. I'm aware that you can simply copy onto the 'System' folder from the root directory in System 6.0.1 and it will automatically move the file into its correct folder, however when done once, it doesn't seem to work again, and the System folder loses its icon and turns yellow. Is this a known bug or a conflict extension?

Anyways, some observations I've made spending hours cataloguing and playing around with all these system add-ons in the hope of creating a definitive archive. It seems writing system extensions was just as perilous then as it is today: you could spend a lot of time developing an INIT, NDA, CDA, CDEV, etc. to extend GS/OS's capability just to have it made redundant when Apple decides to include it in the next version of the operating system. Although not included in this collection, SignatureGS is probably the best example of CDEVs that were made almost totally redundant in System 6, however they're still useful for System 5. DinkyLaunch by Richard Bennett allowed you to choose another launch program upon boot-up, which was superseded by the 'Set Start' CDEV in System 6.

It's also made me realise that finding the right combination of system extensions greatly enhances the abilities of your IIGS - I've been surprised and delighted by a lot of NDAs, CDEVs (what the hell does CDEV stand for?!) and Finder Extras, having missed them the first time around back in the IIGS' heyday.

Some of my favourites:

NDAs: Rolf Braun's Sound It and Mega Box (which between them will play most common sound and music formats from within the Finder or any other program) and DeskMaker (for specifying an image for your desktop) Ninja Force's DeskPlay for MOD playback, André Horstman's Hermes/Shadow Write for text reading and editing, Bret Victor's Mighty Units (for conversion) and Watcha Press? (for finding those accented characters).

CDAs: Nathan Mates' Game Hacker (for when I'm lazy playing games), Digital Exodus' DOCVu v2 and the FTA's Zip CDA (for controlling a ZipGSX in style).

CDEVs: Nathan Mates' KillDaWhoosh (Kills the whoosh sounds and the animation for opening and closing windows - a real speed-up) and Small Extras (removing dividers between the list of Finder Extras and greatly saving space). Twilight II (the ultimate IIGS screen saver, which you'll find some new modules within this archive). I'd like AutoMenus v3 more if there was an option to allow a single and unsustained mouse click to pull down a menu rather than the menu opening as soon as you place the cursor over it! SuperClock is still my menu bar time keeper favourite.

Finder Extras: Chris Vavruska's Finder Flipper (cycles between Windows with option-tab), Jupiter Systems' Finder View 3.0 (for opening nearly all graphics formats within the Finder).

INITs: Nathan Mates' GUPP (Fixes lingering bugs in System 6.0.1) Bret Victor's Shady Bar and Bender (beautifies the menu bar and adds a shadow - I don't like how SlixTop makes the Menu Bar disappear though), and SlixLaunch (does a good job of mimicking OS X when opening an app) Sheppy's Tsukue v2.0.1 (for removing the switch to the text screen for non-System 6 apps) Snakebyte's Quiet Disk (prevents GS/OS from searching the slow and loud 5.25" drives), II Not Disturb (makes that menu bar clock fly), Sys Icons (displays much more decorative small icons in file dialogues), IR (for loading all system extensions on the fly, although some require them to be in their proper System folder locations).

What are your favourites and why? A few extensions have the same or similar abilities - why is one better over another? Add your thoughts to the comments field at the end of the article.

As mentioned before, it can be frustrating getting all system extensions to work so here's a few tips to make things a little easier with your expectations of maintaining a stable GS/OS: any system add-on that has all UPPERCASE filenames is most likely to have been written pre-system 5 and MAY exhibit problems when running from System 5 or higher. CDEVs were introduced with System 5, so you can't use them with System 4 or lower. Likewise, Finder Extras can only be used with System 6. Some add-ons may have trouble working under emulation - one such culprit was WinFlate, otherwise useful to minimise windows, but seems to make the emulated GS/OS environment within Sweet 16 not respond to mouse clicks.

Also, read the documentation included before installing anything. The docs will usually provide helpful tips, cautions and recommendations as to what version of GS/OS to use.

You will likely run into extension conflicts at some point, which can happen when two or more extensions are trying to tap into the same resources of GS/OS, which will most likely result in the system failing during boot-up or weird behaviour and crashes afterwards. The most straight forward way of getting around this is holding down the shift key whilst rebooting, 'Get Info' on the troublesome extension (most likely the last one you installed) and click the 'Inactive' checkbox, then reboot normally. You can also use Bill Tudor's Finder Extra INITMaster to create different sets of extensions.

This archive will be revised if submissions are made, especially in regards to version tracking. Where ever possible I've always included the very latest version of any system extension, in the hope that it offers the most features as well as bug and conflict fixes. Let me know if you can provide a newer version of anything found within this archive, or indeed sometimes suggesting running an older version of something is better (Taifun Boot is the one example: version 1.8 found on Ninja Force's site doesn't seem to work at all). If you know I'm missing any public domain and shareware INITs, NDAs, CDA, CDEVs, Finder Extras, Launchers, icons, icon editors, font utilities, please let me know and where possible provide a full archive including documentation.

Much, MUCH thanks to all who came before me in collecting IIGS system tidbits - Jim Maricondo for the Golden Orchid/Grail archive, Brutal Deluxe for the DeluxeWare CD-ROM, the German AUGE newsletters, A2 Central Newsletters and anyone who had anything to do with the Ground and Cabi.net archives... and thanks to Greg Wildman for keeping mirrors of them.

Note that no GS+, SoftDisk GS or commercial system extensions have been included with this 32meg ProDOS image (there are MANY even more useful extensions amongst these collections). GS+ and Softdisk GS is still available for purchase at Syndicomm. I have made an exception for Bret Victor's work however, as he freely distributes it via his site.

System Add-ons (13 meg)

Some commercial system add-ons, such as Six Pack, Signature and Beagle Brothers Desk Accessories, have been reclassified freeware but haven't been included in this archive for distinction between free/shareware and commercial software. Many of Bill Tudor's works were originally shareware but then updated for Six Pack's commercial release. Other commercial software that is now 'abandonware' i.e. no-one has a current license to sell, such as DeskPak, The Manager, TransProg III and Kangaroo, can still be downloaded separately as part of the broader archive of 'What is the Apple IIGS?'

Speaking of which, does anybody have version 1.5 of the Manager, Transprog III and Kangaroo in English? I'm thinking of resource editing the French versions to replace the French language for English if no-one has these archives. You can remain safely anonymous if you wish to contribute.

Oh, by the way, can anyone help with a very specific, useless and purely cosmetic INIT I *think* I remember using back in the mid 90s? I don't know if my memory's getting confused with the 'Aaron' extension for Mac OS 7.5 that would give your Mac the appearance of Mac OS 8 or not, but the extension I'm thinking of was create a spinning rectangle effect when opening and closing windows, instead of the usual un-spinning rectangle. Completely useless, but cool :-)

UPDATE: Mitch Spector's sent in his system extension collection which I've merged with this online archive. Additions include:

NDAs: Backgammon by Bill Tudor, QuickView by Dave Goetsch, Smiley Clock by ?, DeskTop Color v2 by Earl Gehr, Write it v2 update by CK Haun, freeware versions of Bill Tudor's CPU and Memory Use, Calculator by Tony Morton, Solitaire update to v1.0.6 by Bill Tudor.

CDAs: SHRCapture CDA by ?, Setup Imagewriter II CDA v2 by Bill Ruff, BASIC Errors by John Link, Arkanoid II Ultra Cheat by Ian Schmidt.

CDevs: Alert Sound by ?, INITMaster CDev (with full docs).

INITS: OmniScreen by ?, Title Pic by George B. Zamrov.

UPDATE 2: The archive now includes the Penworks NDA (for using a Kurta tablet), Brutal Deluxe PicViewer (lean, mean Finder Extra for viewing images in Finder, if only it would allow scrolling of images larger than 320x200!) and finally the recently re-released NiftySpell, which allows you to spell check in ANY desktop based program that runs under System 6.0.1. Ewen Wannop's done a great job updating this useful, but memory hungry, NDA. Check out Ewen's internet suite of desktop based apps for use with Marinetti v3.0b3 here.

UPDATE 3: After browsing through the British GS Users Club disks that Antoine Vignau has tirelessly turned into disk images, I have added the following to the 32 meg System Addons archive:

Tools: Tool 27 patch (Anyone know what this fixes?)

CDAs:

Calculator CDA by Terry Morris
STS Screen Saver CDA by Dale T Taylor
Screen Print by Jason Simmons
PlayCD b1 CDA by Aaron Pulver
Bye CDA by Terry Morris
Tearbar CDA by David Empson (now includes docs)

Finder Extra

Finder Flipper Finder Extra v1.0.1 by Chris Vavruska (Updated - hopefully fixes the bug that displays an error message every time you quit back to the Finder)

CDevs

Password v2.0 CDevs by Brian D Wells

NDAs

Scrap Master NDA by Dave Huang
Calendar NDA v1.2 by Greg Engelkemeir
JumboDesk v2.12 NDA by Jason Simmons (update from v 2.0)

Game Interpreters Part IV: Snatcher

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:00:00 +0200

Unfortunately, it's that time where the 'what if' switch in my brain goes off again. On this occasion it's around the adventure game Snatcher, although this one's a different kettle of fish from my previous musings of bringing 'new' adventure games to the IIGS for some home-brew treatment.

As I was backpacking throughout Europe in 2010, three months had passed before I realised I hadn't played any video games, let alone emulated an Apple IIGS in all that time. Of course, seeing the sights, tasting local cuisines and experiencing culture kept me busy almost all of the time, but the craving for staring at some sort of screen began to take hold. You need to take time out from having time out you know.

I'm not entirely sure why, but I decided to check out 'Kega Fusion', a combined Sega Master System, Genesis/MegaDrive, 32X and Mega CD emulator. This is how an emulator should be done on Mac OS X: easy to open ROMs and disk images (including cue and bin files), output screen shots, save states, and the smoothest scrolling I've ever seen on a Mac, thanks in part to much of the core of the emulator having been written in Intel assembly.

I decided to play Hideo Kojima's Snatcher for Sega CD, as it's the only version of Snatcher that's been officially translated into English, the MSX version having been fan translated to both English and Portuguese.

I had hoped to play the original PC-88 version, with larger scene graphics and better music than the MSX version, however no-one has created an English translation. Anyway, the Sega CD version is probably the best version existing, taking everything from the Japanese PC Engine CD-ROM version and adding some of its own unique content and luckily escaping the unnecessary excesses that came with the Playstation and Sega Saturn versions.

While the Sega Mega CD wasn't a popular format and most of its games were panned, I was immediately impressed with its capabilities - long video cut scenes weren't simply pre-rendered video, playing back with some crappy codec that compromised image quality. Instead, these highly detailed cut scenes are beautiful pixel perfect animations that ran on the fly, thanks to some sort of scripting dictating the action, with excellent redbook audio and music accompanying. Using a IIGS back as a young teenager, this is where I hoped CD-based multimedia was heading.

Back to Snatcher: In the year 2042 Earth's borders and power bases shift in accordance with 'The Catastrophe', a mysterious but cataclysmic bio-chemical event triggered in Russia some 40 years before had claimed half the population of the world. If that wasn't distressing enough, in recent years, the Snatcher menace slowly began to reveal itself. These enigmatic robots were infiltrating society by substituting people with themselves, murdering their hosts and taking their appearance. Little was known about them even after the JUNKER agency was founded to combat the threat.

You are Gillian Seed, a man haunted with empty memories. This is also true of Gillian's wife, Jamie, and unable to reconcile without a shared past they decide to separate. Their mutual amnesia is no accident however and what Gillian does know is that they were found in suspended animation in the Russian wasteland. Now living in Neo Kobe, Japan, where Snatchers were first discovered Gillian instinctively joins the JUNKER agency in the hope of discovering his missing past.

I had heard good things about Snatcher and for once my expectations weren't dashed. The pixel art maintains a consistent anime style, illustrating scenes in high detail that set the right mood and provide visual clues to help you progress. Hand in hand with the visuals is the brilliant audio effects and even better music. Between these and the excellent well paced story, revealing just enough of the trail you follow to provide twists and revelations you never expect, you'll feel this is a real world with genuine moments of apprehension, tension, horror, laughter and even sympathy for characters you interact with in this skewed future.

Normally, anyone would simply enjoy this interactive tale, but I soon couldn't help myself from thinking - what a shame this wasn't released on the IIGS. The graphics, animation, interface, sound and music could all be done on the IIGS, with little modification. The Sega CD version includes a lot of audio in the guise of voice acting and I concede this could be done on the IIGS with a CD-ROM drive, however this would greatly limit the already incredibly small amount of people who'd likely play it today on a IIGS. The PC88 and MSX versions were all text based and that would work better for the IIGS - voice acting, though surprisingly good as it is in the English Sega translation, isn't necessary as the story can unfold just as well if read. The graphics convert incredibly well to the IIGS. In a way, so many scenes' colour is distributed into horizontal bands, which is perfect for the multiple colour palette ability of the IIGS. Animation could be handled with Pegasoft's Draw Tools, or Kenrick Mock's SAP, or possibly even the file size behemoths of Paintworks animations. The sound effects and music, usually short but incredibly effective compositions that loop, could playback at 22Khz or less as samples with the ACE toolset on without problem, although it might require a fair bit of RAM for the longer musical arrangements.

At any rate, I have all the music and sound effects, hundreds of screen grabs comprising of the graphics from the game, but one trick to producing this on the IIGS is that an interpreter would need to be written from scratch. Snatcher's gameplay is nowhere near as complicated as a Sierra Creative Interpreter game - there is no text parser and no collision detection and bordering of areas where your character can and can't go within a scene. The way you interact in Snatcher is very simple - you predominately choose between the options presented in list form. These actions will lead to dialogue heavy conversations with characters, in depth analysis of crime scenes, new choices arising from exploring existing ones and occasionally there might be some text entry to solve a puzzle or make a video call. This could mean however that a IIGS interpreter could be written with easier, higher level languages like C or Pascal, as most heavy lifting could be left to the toolset.

The other real trick if Snatcher were produced on the IIGS is the game's content itself. Although the entire script of Snatcher has been extracted from the Sega CD version, it's not in a form that's easily used with an interpreter. Where do scenes begin and end? What defines the image that should be displayed or the music played for a scene? How should selectable options be listed and made distinctive from dialogue? How would inventory management or saved games work? Although the game is mostly linear, there are some variations that can occur if actions are done at different times. I've only played through the game once and I've read that I've missed a lot of video phone numbers and an extra scene in the shopping district with Jamie involving a potential Snatcher.

Additionally, the spoken dialogue would need to be replaced with written dialogue. Using a program like Adobe Premiere Pro, which can automatically transcribe spoken words to written form used for subtitling, might make this process easier, rather than manually writing down the voice acting...there is a hell of a lot of it!

Again, I have to reiterate that I'm not a programmer, but an 'interpreter' I'm most familiar with is a web browser. Using XML style tags, the game's content could be sorted and graphics and audio cues and interaction could be defined with examples like these:

<playsndXXX> cue to play a sound that plays only once
<playmusXX> cue to play music that loops
<red> </red> text will appear red
<blue </blue> text will appear blue
<yellow> </yellow> text will appear yellow (white is the default colour for text)

<option1> for the first listed available selection listed
<option2> for the second listed and so on...

<revealoptionX> reveals another menu option previously hidden until another text is read.
<pause=5> pause text for drama/suspense, in seconds
<looptext> once last text of an option has been displayed, loop the answers back to the beginning again

Perhaps using such tags, a IIGS interpreter could know what to do with it. The tags listed here are not exhaustive by any means and someone with more experience with structuring XML style tags would be greatly appreciated if Snatcher GS would ever be undertaken.

For the meantime though, simply enjoy this slideshow I've prepared:

Snatcher Slideshow (332Kb)

I used Brutal Deluxe's Convert 3200, as its batch convert did a marvellous job of converting all 48 images, which I had prepared in Photoshop to account for the change between the Sega Mega CD's resolution and the IIGS' 320x200 super hi-res graphics mode. I even enjoyed making the icon, which was made from a screen shot of the PC88 version, which uses a graphics resolution of 640 by 200 - perfect for the IIGS' usual desktop. Thanks Super Convert 4!

Game Interpreters Part III: SCI Adventure Games

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:01:00 +0200

This latest blog in a series devoted to game interpreters and their potential for the IIGS is all about SCI, also known as the 'Sierra Creative Interpreter'. The good news, while not specifically for the Apple II, is that SCUMMVM now supports SCI0 to SCI1.1 interpreter games.

I've waited 21 years to play these games without a DOS prompt. Everything's going to get all wibbly wobbly as I take you back to the late '80s yet again to explain.

Back in the September 1988 issue of A+, I read about the latest CES trade show, which at the time was one of the biggest events devoted to new computer and video games. It was an exciting article, detailing a lot of upcoming releases for the IIGS. Given that I was currently relishing the then current crop of AGI based Sierra adventure games on the IIGS, of prime interest were that Sierra's latest adventure games, using their new SCI interpreter, were listed as a future release for the IIGS. As much as I loved the AGI based games, their graphics were a little archaic, even for the IIGS, so the next round of sequels for Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest, with enhanced resolution, sounded an awesome prospect.

Our family placed an order for Space Quest III for the IIGS in 1989 directly with Sierra, so as soon as it was released it would be shipped immediately. Months passed and they eventually sent it...for MS-DOS.

News was now getting out that Sierra had technically assessed the IIGS and found it too slow to port the SCI interpreter for it. I was less than happy. Rather than rush out and buy an MS-DOS machine (unthinkable) or an Amiga 1200 (as Sierra still released games for Commodore's flagship, and I briefly considered it) I continued using the IIGS as my primary computer until December 1994, without having played these new Sierra games.

Until now. Leisure Suit Larry II: Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places, is pretty bad - a very silly story, barely any music, not particularly satisfying puzzles and average graphics, but LSL3 looks more promising. Space Quest III, was well worth the wait - great story, funny, great graphics and music. The SCI remake of the original King's Quest was satisfying and currently playing The Colonel's Bequest, is quite a different adventure and all the more enjoyable for it.

Playing the games through SCUMMVM is a joy - there's no need to use an emulator or muck around with a DOS prompt (although if you're on a Mac, Boxer circumvents this for DOSBox beautifully). The games load instantly, require much less CPU being an interpreter than an emulator, and there are many graphics display options.

Of course none of this isn't much good for the IIGS, except perhaps indirectly; a LOT of reverse engineering went into this new version of SCUMMVM, research that started way back in the '90s with the earlier FreeSCI interpreter and without any help from the original developers, unlike the SCUMM games. Maybe it could be of help to anyone who'd dare attempt getting a SCI interpreter up and running for the IIGS.

Also, I'd like to not leave you, faithful readers, empty handed once again other than filling your head with all the fanciful stuff stuck in mine.

If SCI or SCUMM games were ever to be done for the IIGS, the music would have to be in a format already native to the IIGS and so, using MIDISurgeon (available only from the last issue of GS+ magazine) I have converted a slew of these SCI games' MIDI based soundtracks, thanks to Quest Studios, to the IIGS native MIDISynth format.

Although I'm not the biggest fan of MIDISynth music (I think the resonance sounds too 'tinny' and its too taxing on the CPU) I'm sure you'll agree that after hearing this converted music in SynthLab or another player, you start to appreciate how the IIGS just missed out on the multimedia gaming craze of the '90s. It's a shame we never got to hear how Sierra might have intended for their music to sound on the IIGS for their newer games, because they did a fantastic job realising all music and sound effects for their previous IIGS productions.

Additionally, all the original MIDI files are included, so if you'd like to design your own set of instruments and make your own patches using MIDISurgeon to set the perfect tone for the music, feel welcome...and welcome to share with the rest of the IIGS community! The converted music as it stands has no manual tweaking, mainly because I haven't a clue on how to do it. The music would benefit greatly with someone with a bit more knowledge of MIDI. You can play each sequence from the Finder after copying the MegaBox desk accessory to your system folder (included in below disk image).

Sierra Music + Others for the IIGS (7.6meg)

One last thing: Versions of Sweet 16 lower than v2.3 seem to choke on MIDISynth file playback and crash the virtual IIGS. Try using Sweet 16 v2.3 or higher, KEGS, GSPort or even Bernie ][ the Rescue instead.

The Perfect GS/OS Desktop Picture or How to Get the Most of the 640 x 200 Super Hi-res mode

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:21:00 +0200

Let's face facts: the 640 x 200 pixel super hi-res graphics mode is as Woz-like ingenious as it is frustrating.

It was cleverly introduced to the inner workings of the IIGS to provide a higher resolution than 320 x 200, allowing more detail and screen real estate into applications that followed Apple's GUI guidelines with no additional overhead. According to the 'Apple IIGS Book,' providing a resolution of 640 x 200 instead of 640 x 400 ensured that the accompanying RGB monitor available with the IIGS could be made cheaper instead of the more expensive monitors used by the Atari ST and Amiga; although Apple's solution ended up being more expensive than both those alternatives when shipped!

Together with the limitation of only being able to use 6 colours in 640 mode (which HAVE to be dithered to 16) or 4 colours to maintain the original colours with the use of dithering, it meant the IIGS need only ship with 32k of VRAM in its VGC chip. The dithered colours almost appear completely flat thanks to the dot pitch of the Apple Color RGB monitor, which was better suited to displaying 320 x 200 pixels.

But, this means compromise. Much like the original hi-res graphics mode of the very first Apple II, it allowed a higher resolution, but the price was a lack of control over how the colours could be used, which is dependent on what vertical column of pixels you're hoping to use for a specific colour.

Essentially, what this means is if you're using the standard dithered colour palette in 640 mode is that you can't even use the original 6 colours in addition to the dithered 16 colour palette (the exception being the two colours sitting at the beginning and end of the palette, usually reserved for black and white) unless you intend to use 1 pixel width because the colour can only be used on alternating vertical columns of pixels: hence the mandatory dithering. Below is an image that shows both the original 6 colours dithered into the larger 16 colour palette:

While dithering does extend the number of colours available, they're not the best: hardly vibrant, they look either muddy or washed out. Of course, having more colours available can have many practical uses (labelling files with a colour in the Finder, for example) but doesn't always allow for the most aesthetically pleasing palette, but we're stuck with it.

In the broader world of computing, desktop pictures are hot. You can easily recognise a Mac from a PC simply from the desktop picture...and Apple and Microsoft don't just choose any old picture, they're either beautiful photos or illustrations with amazing tonal and colour ranges that truly show off the capabilities of whatever display is hooked up to the computer or built-in to a mobile or tablet device, but at the same time, don't overpower what else is on screen, i.e. the operating system and applications.

It's time the IIGS had some decent 640 x 200 standard colour palette mode graphics for its desktop, replacing the boring default periwinkle blue with the freeware desk accessory 'DeskMaker' by Rolf Braun.

Pixel art takes a lot of dedication and patience, neither of which I can cultivate at this point in my life and so I first turned to the graphic stylings of my more newer retro computing interest, the PC88. The PC88 also shares the same 640 x 200 resolution as the IIGS, however, the 8 colours it can display at once are not constricted to any vertical rows of pixels - colours can be used solid, or dithered (on alternating vertical columns of pixels AND horizontal rows).

8 colours might not sound like a lot, but the Japanese are truly masters of the visual medium and know how to fully exploit design limitations without losing an image's impact. Turning to methods more commonly used in limited colour print runs, a lot of PC88 artists used very extended palettes using varying dithering combinations to create the illusion of more colours. The more spread out two colours are combined, the greater the likelihood that they too can be displayed on the IIGS without any modification.

Results can vary as to how well some images convert, but the most important thing on the IIGS is using the right tool to bring these PC88 images across: Super Convert 4. While every other graphics conversion program for the IIGS treats the 640 mode like the 320 mode with the 640 mode palette, Super Convert truly respects all the pixels found in the original image and will convert them as best it can across the available 640 pixels across the highest horizontal resolution of the IIGS.

And so I scoured many PC88 slideshows, paint programs and games via emulation (using Quasi88, which I had to compile myself on my PowerMac G5 and separately again for my Intel based MacBook Pro with some help from the Emulation MacScene forum) taking screen shots of images with the best detail and composition. I was hoping to come across a lot of cool images of mecha from my favourite anime, Macross, but only found the one (from a paint program called Da Vinci). Here's the original PC88 image:

Conversion using Super Convert 4 yielded this first unfortunate result:

However, all is not lost. The image just happens to be using colours that aren't in the right vertical column of pixels in the 640 mode palette. Photoshop has become an invaluable tool as an intermediary when converting images to the IIGS and is especially useful in this case. To improve the conversion I simply select Minmay's face and microphone and shift them one pixel across to the left. It's true I'm losing a column worth of pixel detail, but this is negligible when you consider the new result:

I made similar changes to other images but in a lot of cases, I got lucky and the colours aligned to the vertical columns of the 640 mode palette. Here are some additional examples with which you can compete against OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard desktops with your IIGS (from the PC88 games Schwarzschild 1 & 2):

Two more of my favourite converted images:

My other approach for converting existing imagery to great looking IIGS desktops was this: find pixel art with 2 to 4 colours. It's pointless trying to convert 32 colour images and expect them to look good in the 640 mode: don't even try.

I rummaged through Pixel Joint using a customised search specifying a listing of images as large or larger than 200 by 200 pixels and using less than 8 colours. There are many great images using these limitations, as quite often Pixel Joint will host competitions that truly test the metal of its artists by asking them to complete illustrations with restrictions on colour, theme and resolution.

I may edit images in Photoshop slightly to improve the composition for the IIGS desktop (always leave more blank space on the right hand side of the screen to allow the disk icons to be seen easily) but here are some results:

Ultimate Apple IIGS Desktops (1meg)

So...hot or not? I can't help feeling that the IIGS would have majorly benefitted from 64k of VRAM, allowing PC88 style 640 x 200 mode images and 32 colours per scanline 320 x 200 graphics akin to the Amiga, but I hope you like these images and that they bring that little something extra to your IIGS experience while you muck around doing more productive things with our sweet 16.

The Japanese Connection

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:10:00 +0200

I've always loved playing Thexder, Silpheed and especially, Ancient Land of Ys on the Apple IIGS. But with equal enjoyment came equal fascination: where exactly did these games originate in Japan? Research to answer this question lead me on a wonderful retro computing journey of discovery that, quite to my surprise, came full circle and ended up back to the Apple II again.

Being a child of the 80s, Thexder was a no brainer given the transforming robots craze of the day. Silpheed was one of the few rare computer games with its intense bullet dodging and weapon power ups to rival arcade button mashing originals but surpass them with many more music compositions than normally included in an arcade game soundtrack. Ys' new style of real-time action role-playing combined with memorable and emotive music makes this triumvirate responsible for many hours of enjoyment.

Fascination stemmed from Sierra and Kyodai's marketing, respectively, reassuring us that these imported titles from Game Arts and Falcom were major hits for the Japanese personal computer market. Evidently then, in the 80s the Japanese weren't using the same computers as western countries like the Apple II, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST and IBM compatibles otherwise we'd have already been playing these games alongside our Japanese brethren in 1985, the original release date of Thexder. Nowhere on the game boxes or manuals did it reveal what platform these games originally came from.

You always want what you can't have and my interest in these games only heightened more when Sierra weened itself from the IIGS in 1989, but continued to convert Japanese games for MS-DOS. Sorcerian was announced in Sierra's Autumn 1989 newsletter: I dearly would have loved to have played that during those timeless, carefree days back in high school after thoroughly relishing Falcom's other major RPG franchise, ‘Ys'. Further envy followed with Sierra's next Game Arts import Thexder 2: Codename Firehawk. And only recently did I discover a hidden gem: Zeliard. It was the last Game Arts title Sierra translated, an action platformer with some mild RPG elements added for good measure. Upon discovering it I started something I thought I'd never do, just to try playing it: emulate MS-DOS. It was a cold day in hell that day I can assure you. Playing these games was good, but I was still intrigued about where they originally came from, or more specifically, what computers were they initially designed for in their own exotic market? How is it that when Ken Williams, president of Sierra, went to Japan on a trip to secure selling more of his titles to the Japanese market, that he ended up licensing Japanese games for western audiences? The answer is not only the creative talent that went into making these games, but also the unique hardware for which the games were developed.

Japan developed its own personal computers out of necessity; early personal computers such as the Apple II, although much respected in Japan, had difficulty accommodating the many characters within the Hiragana and Katakana ‘alphabets', not to mention the many hundreds more in Kanji. Not content with the language hacks applied to western computers, Japan started to develop their own systems to better accommodate the Japanese language and their own market, with personal computers being a way to increase productivity during the financial boom of the 80s.

NEC was one of the first companies to release a Japanese personal computer, the PC-8001 in 1979 and dominated the industry throughout the 80s. New hardware releases saw the PC-6001 and the PC-8801 series in 1981 and in 1985, the PC-8801 Mk II SR, the platform upon which Thexder was born and is said to have had the most impact on the hardware's sales success; quite impressive and not to mention ironic, given that these computers were never specifically designed to be games machines. At last! I had found the answer at the heart of my curiousity! Competitors to NEC for the Japanese market were Sharp, Fujitsu and the many hardware manufacturers supporting the MSX standard, which all sported similar specs.

Something I'd always found interesting was that both Thexder and Silpheed on the IIGS used the 640 x 200 super hi-resolution graphics mode: unusual as it greatly limited the number of colours in the palette, which you usually want to maximise for visual impact. It turns out that the PC88 (for short) predominately uses a graphics resolution of 640 x 200, just like most IIGS applications that follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and the desktop metaphor. Unlike the IIGS however, 8 colours can be displayed from a palette of 512 colours, where the IIGS can really only display 4 true colours or 16 dithered colours (with black and white being ‘true' and red, blue, green and yellow requiring to be dithered), although the palette can be chosen from 4096 colours.

Luckily however, the graphics of Thexder were designed for 4 colours (once the multi-coloured explosions were removed) and translated perfectly to the IIGS (but, like Devo, I like explosions too). Silpheed's graphics had to compromise a little more on the IIGS in regards to colour, but this perhaps resulted in a more sensible and less gaudy colour palette than the PC88 original. But again, the IIGS version lacks something of the original: the rolling planetary graphics seen during battles in orbit.

Graphics resolutions are just the start of more similarities to the IIGS. The PC-8801 Mk II SR and the models that came after it also shared an amazing sound and music capability, which quite possibly mobilised Ken Williams to strongly support sound cards for IBM compatibles in the late 80s, which in turn probably helped solidify the MS-DOS computer as the ideal machine for home use for most people in the 90s, along with VGA graphics and the sheer weight of safety in numbers... OK, so that's one point that doesn't work in the PC-88's favour!

Keep in mind that the PC-8801 series are 8-bit computers as well, the Mk II SR model sporting nothing more than a 4Mhz Z80 processor. Like a stock standard IIGS, this makes them relatively underpowered beasts, but clever programming saw through these limitations. Many PC88 games scroll by blocks/tiles rather than pixel by pixel. This may not have allowed for smooth 60 frames per second scrolling, but the PC88 instead created a different kind of ‘rhythm' for scrolling action games. Some IIGS games could have benefited from this technique, but any future IIGS games will soon be able to rely on the GTE engine for smooth scrolling (another blog for another time!).

Thinking beyond techniques that could have been used on the IIGS and dreaming, as I like to do, many games for the PC-8801 Mk II SR would have made terrific IIGS ports. Of course, translating from Japanese to English can be a costly and time consuming effort and companies like Sierra no doubt hedged their bets on the bigger market of MS-DOS to make their more comfortable returns.

There are many Japanese websites showcasing the games of the platforms of NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp, but none better than the ‘Retro PC Game Music Streaming Radio' site. Primarily intended to be the online radio station for Japanese retro gamers, the site also includes many screen shots, recorded intro and completion movies as well as box scans. Keep an eye out for the extended ending to Silpheed or the entire intro scene cut from the MS-DOS version of Thexder 2. Take enough time to check out titles you've never heard of, like Snatcher, a cyberpunk adventure from Metal Gear Solid creator Kojima Hideo, or the plethora of RPG titles. In these examples the narrative plays out beautifully by combining story telling techniques of manga, anime and cinema. Attention to detail is evident, not only in creating a sense of style but by making the most of the limited graphics hardware, RAM (64k) and disk space (340k 5.25" floppies).

Coming back to the similarities between the PC88 and the IIGS, every Apple II and PC-8801 series computer share a Microsoft derived version of BASIC in its ROM that's accessible as soon the machine starts up. But there's one last surprising revelation...

Going even further back, before the release of the PC-8801 MK II SR I discovered something particularly interesting. Many classic 8-bit Apple II games had been converted to the PC88, like those from Sierra (Time Zone, Sammy Lightfoot, Mystery House, the Wizard & the Princess) Broderbund (Midnight Magic, Lode Runner, Choplifter, Karateka), Origin (Ultima Series), Sir-Tech (Wizardry Series) and SSI (Phantasie Series) amongst many others.

It's these last RPG themed titles that are of particular importance - these are the games that inspired the works of Falcom and in turn, produced their works of Ys and Sorcerian. Also, one time small gaming companies Square and Enix, now Japanese gaming juggernaut Square-Enix, cut their teeth on the PC88 and were also influenced by the likes of Ultima and Wizardry. So if your kids or anyone else too young to appreciate the Apple II are engrossed in the latest Final Fantasy, just quietly let them know that Japanese RPGs owe a debt of thanks to the Apple II. Respect from those whippersnappers will surely follow and the circle of the Japanese connection with the Apple II will be complete.

I Love Pixel Art!

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:03:26 +0200

Quite simply, I love pixel art...truly, madly, deeply (4-bits of it to be precise).

This love affair started playing arcade games from around 1985 to 1988 and at around the same time, our family procured an Apple IIGS. I loved the near photo-realistic style of the imagery and somehow, to my mind as an impressionable pre-adolescent, this new digital imagery stood as a proud symbol of how far homo sapiens had come with technology. I didn't think they existed for any other reason than to fill my head with wonder.

Seeing these new graphics abilities became all-important and getting the most out of our IIGS involved buying up as many IIGS specific programs as fiscally possible. My first encounters involved Paintworks Plus, Tass Times in Tonetown and my all time favourite, and probably the game I've put more hours into than any other over my lifetime, the Bard's Tale. There are many tremendous examples of great pixel art into various IIGS games, but the Bard's Tale still holds up as one of the best.

Strangely however, as technology leapfrogged itself I should have marvelled at its progress and awe at the increasing bit depths and higher resolutions of computer graphics. But a lot of the time, I cringed during the 1990s as a lot of games on the PC and Mac started to use poorly scanned traditional artwork, or worse still, 3D graphics that were either pre-rendered or real time.

The aesthetic of 2D graphics always appealed far more to me, as it seemed to be closer to real art, only with less colours and a low resolution. The graphics can be executed in various different ways, allowing the artists to develop their own styles, something that can't always be said for 3D artwork - most of the time, it looks the same, attempting to create as realistic an environment as possible, but with such a limited number of polygons to simulate real life, these graphics now look laughable as the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 reign. No doubt in ten years time, the graphics of the PS3 and XBox 360 will be considered equally laughable.

For me at least, pixel art will hold up forever. Usually the best examples of design are those that still manage to work well (if not better) due to the limitations and restrictions placed upon a piece. Pixel art adheres to the same principles. A great picture is a great picture; if a great picture is made with 16 colours with a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels, well, that's a REALLY great picture.

I've also been pleasantly surprised that I'm not the only one who thinks this. I began a quest, which started after my very good friend Andrew sent me a link to Junior Senior's clip for ‘Move Your Feet', a clip lavishly produced with low-res animation created on an Amiga with Deluxe Paint. The Amiga is to Andrew what the Apple IIGS is to me.

My quest to find more contemporary pixel art became an obsession; fortunately I didn't have too far to look and found salvation at Pixel Joint.

Pixel Joint is the world's cream of the crop when it comes to laying down artwork a pixel at a time. Artists from every corner of the globe are contributing works to weekly challenges set by their peers, as well as showing works in progress and mock-screen shots for games, as well as art for art's sake.

Not long after enthusiastically pouring over these inspiring pieces of digital art did I think: I'd love to see that on the IIGS. That's what you can find here - 3 disks full of slideshows of artwork converted to the IIGS native Apple Preferred Super Hi-res format. Each piece is fully credited to each artist and their permission sought before including their work in this collection. Some works I would have loved to include didn't translate as well to the IIGS as the artist would have liked, so I removed them from the collection. If you explore Pixel Joint, you'll still find lots of great artwork which you can convert to display on your IIGS and judge for yourself as to whether you think they're still great images.

Download Pixel Art Slideshows for the IIGS (1.5 meg)

Each slideshow is self-booting and runs Ron Mercer's terrific shareware program SHRView. Most of the conversions were made with Ron's other fantastic program, Prism. I did some preparation in Photoshop first however, to crop certain images to better suit the resolution limitation of the IIGS. Apologies to my old friend Ian Brumby (author of Super Convert v4.0) and to Antoine and Olivier of Brutal Deluxe (creators of Convert 3200) but I found Prism converts images very efficiently by way of a simple interface that also seemed to yield the best results. By the way, not a single piece of art has been converted to the 3200 colour mode, which I feel is too crippling to be of any practical use on the IIGS. Finally, Universe Master was used to alphabetically sort the files of the directory when played back by SHRView.

I hope you'll feel as inspired as I have seeing all this art. Who said that 16 colours per scan line was never enough? And if you've got a IIGS project in mind that requires some graphics, whether it be as expansive as a platform game or a nice icon or ‘About' dialogue box, get in touch with these artists at Pixel Joint. They'd love nothing more than the challenge of doing great art under the limitations of the IIGS...to make REALLY great art!

Game Interpreters Part II: An easier adventure to accomplish?

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:35:57 +0200

OK, so creating a runtime environment for Lucas Arts adventure games for the IIGS is no walk in the park. How about something that's hopefully easier, but still for the truly adventurous at heart?

The IIGS excels at text/graphic adventures: Tass Times in Tonetown, Dream Zone and the ICOM series to name a few. We've also got an interpreter that can play all the classic Infocom adventures.

But remember the ‘G' in Apple IIGS stands for ‘Graphics'? And Infocom weren't the only game in town when it came to determining your fate with a text parser. Enter, perhaps, Magnetic Scrolls' text/graphic adventures: The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption, Fish, Myth and Wonderland.

Magnetic Scrolls was a U.K. based company in the 80s that released six well-regarded text/graphic adventures for the Atari ST, Amiga, Spectrum, MS-DOS and even some for the 8-bit Apple II (Myth is not included in the six, given that it was not a public release). And just like the Lucas Arts adventures, the fans still want the opportunity to relive these classics on platforms other than those listed above. So they've created an interpreter, that's portable having been written in C. Also, while very convenient, though technically abandonware (which means nothing to protect your arse legally), all of the games are downloadable in complete packages for use with the ‘Magnetic' interpreter - on the same page you download the interpreter!

The graphics in Magnetic Scrolls games became most detailed with the Atari ST version: a feat the IIGS can match given these are 4-bit graphics.

So things are looking good: a portable interpreter, requiring little processing horsepower to run, with graphics able to be displayed on the IIGS without conversion and the games are easily obtained (although I strongly encourage you to buy any version of these games on eBay to make it legal at your end). The IIGS, despite its limitations, can marry text and graphics with élan...if anyone is willing to give the coding a shot to see it happen that is, as I can't program my way out of a brown paper bag.

For my part however, I've created some screen shot mock-ups, which should hopefully help the planning required to implement the Magnetic interpreter to the IIGS.

As a starting point, I decided to stick to the standard Apple user interface in 320 by 200 graphics mode. This should have the advantage that a) programmers can take advantage of the Toolbox to take care of text display and scrolling, pull down menus, open and save dialogue boxes, etc and b) in theory, you can continue using desk accessories and perhaps even use the Manager so you can switch back and forth between that all important spreadsheet and enjoying some time with Alice in Wonderland.

One aspect of Magnetic Scrolls games that I find bizarre is that the sizes of the graphics vary from scene to scene. This may have made it easier for the artist to complete all the graphics on time and fit them all on a floppy, but it also creates the problem of balancing a consistent interface and wasting valuable screen real estate.

Starting with Wonderland's opening graphic, which is the largest single image I've seen in a MS game yet (mind you, I haven't played through to the end of ANY of them) but I'm going to guess, foolishly, that the graphics don't get any bigger than this.

The landscape image above is 262 pixels wide by 148 pixels high on the 320 by 200 'canvas'. Positioning the image from the very top and centring from the horizontal axis allows just enough space for that much needed text with which players will interact with. Copying and pasting text from the Mac version of Magnetic into the Hermes text editor on the IIGS, I could simulate the appearance of text on the IIGS. I chose the font ‘Swift', which you can find on the pre-installed System 6.0.1 hard drive image, as a substitute for the default Shaston font. Swift is fantastic - it saves a good deal of horizontal space compared to Shaston, yet remains very easy to read. You can see it allows up to four lines of text and an additional line for the parser. Just enough so you won't always miss that opening line when entering a new scene, minimising the amount of times you'll need to scroll back to catch all the details of entering new rooms.

But that leaves no room for the standard menu bar above? Wrong! If we can use the same trick that Becky Heineman employed with the GS/OS versions of Bard's Tale I and II, as well as Dragon Wars, the menu bar appears over the top of the game's graphics only when the mouse cursor ventures to the top of the screen. If it's too difficult to code the menu bar in this way, it can sit over the image. A few rows of pixels won't really matter, as the real attention to detail is found in each game's text, not the graphics. Also, note where the allocation of colour palettes would be placed for display on a IIGS.

Getting back to the graphic on display during the game - all other graphics will use the absolute centre point of the largest graphic (opening Wonderland image), and then use this as their centre point when being displayed. See the examples above that help illustrate the point.

I've mocked up some samples of the pull down menus, with consideration given to clear communication and choosing appropriate keyboard shortcuts. In context, ‘Adventure', as seen in ‘Choose Adventure...', refers to the Magnetic Scrolls game currently being played, making a clear distinction between that and ‘Open Saved Game...' which refers to restoring your last position in the adventure that you saved. ‘Save Transcript' will save all the text so far displayed to a new text file, a common feature with interpreters and damn handy when making these types of screen shots!

If it were feasible to support, it would be great to be able to select text that you enter into the parser. This would enable the player to copy and paste verbs or nouns that may require repetition to try your answers to puzzles. All Edit menu commands would of course use standardised keyboard shortcuts.

Not found in the OS X version of Magnetic at least, a 'Commands' menu would enter commonly used actions into the parser automatically, saving you the trouble of typing them. I've given keyboard shortcuts to moving in different directions of the compass point, inspired by the directions that can be given by the face of the clock (although you can't have a shortcut for command-12 to mean the same as north, so I've rounded it to 1). Last but not least, checking your inventory with command-i, might provide that inspiration you need to solve that puzzle.

Some Magnetic Scrolls games include hints that can provide additional puzzle-solving inspiration. I've quickly mocked up how it might look on the IIGS, based on the OS X version, but I don't know if this hierarchical system would work. It may perhaps with the 'Hierarchic' permanent initialisation file from Seven Hills Software, which is free.

Some additional points: Wonderland includes some basic frame based animation for some scenes. It also includes image scrolling. Again, I feel both are potentially capable to realise on the IIGS, as we're not talking 60 frames per second type animation.

So anyone willing to take the plunge programming this for the IIGS, a true adventurer? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

If all goes well, it might not end there for ‘new' text/graphic adventures appearing on the IIGS. Level 9, another UK company respected for its text adventures, produced many games in the 80s, the mock-up above for the game 'Scapeghost', including those with graphics for the Atari ST. And just like Magnetic Scrolls games, a portable platform agnostic interpreter has also been written for these Level 9 games...

Inspiration from a Higher Place

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 07:29:14 +0200

At 36886 feet, 868 kilometres per hour and over Indonesia to be precise.

You see, stopping in Singapore on the way back from travelling through the U.K., France, Switzerland and Italy en-route back home to Australia, my girlfriend Bronwen discovered a very impressive book at a very impressive bookshop within the confines of the three terminals of the very impressive Changi airport: ‘Rogue Leaders - the Story of Lucas Arts' by Rob Smith is a retro gaming coffee table book with all the dirt on each and every one of the usually great games to come out of this great gaming company.

Of course, the only Lucas Arts game to come out for the IIGS, or at least back as it was known in 1991, Lucas Film Games, was Pipe Dream. But I've sung the praises of Lucas Arts classic adventure games, which would be perfect gaming fodder for the IIGS (if only someone would write an interpreter for our favourite platform).

Not only that, but when I ditched the IIGS back in 1995 for a Power Macintosh 7100, and was happy to be able to play new games again (I was such a shallow creature!) Lucas Arts games were among the cream of the crop: Rebel Assault I and II, X-Wing, Full Throttle, the Dig, Dark Forces and so on. It's also a little known fact that the Mac versions were usually better than their PC originals, including graphics twice the resolution. It was a bit like the IIGS versions of Sierra's adventure games being the best and that the extra money we plonk down for our Apples was being justified. Fine and dandy until Apple's financial woes in 1996, and Lucas Arts decided to stop developing Mac conversions of their newer works, as the Mac was surely to die (I hear cheers from some and boo hisses from others) and not make them enough money.

But getting back to the BOOK: as I flip through the pages during my flight it becomes more apparent how nice a surprise it is: despite the turbulence! I subscribe to Retro Gamer magazine and regularly visit the SCUMMVM site and there was no mention of this book being on its way. Given that it was printed in China, perhaps Singapore, being of closer proximity, received copies of the book first? The book even includes details of Lucas Arts latest game ‘The Force Unleashed', which was just released in time for Christmas 2008.

It's exactly in the style of how I hope to accomplish my Apple IIGS coffee table book, mostly in its approach to design, however Rogue Leaders has access to a lot of working concept sketches and interviews with staff, which alas my book will not concentrate on. But it's inspired me somewhat, as the layouts I'd created so far, to be honest, were crap and I know it can be done better. I've been trying to avoid sub-standard presentation, as existing books devoted to the Spectrum and C64 respectively have...less than good looking layouts. We're Apple people! We expect good design and glossy pages! We love being lied to by our favourite fruit company!

Work continues on the ‘What is the Apple IIGS?' coffee table book. Remember you can help!

CFFA Card Review

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:06:00 +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.

This animated GIF shows the same technique I used to copy the 2image partitions across to each of the partitions set up on the compact flash card.

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 v1.0.7, Tool 34 update from Brutal Deluxe and the HFS patch, with every System Tool and font required for almost every IIGS program and many shareware and freeware games - 13.3meg)

System Add-ons (Customise GS/OS with the largest collection of system extensions ever accumulated - 12.5meg)

Fonts (A huge collection of bitmap fonts and a large selection of TrueType fonts for use with Pointless as well - 15.1meg)

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 (17meg)

Adventure and Simulation Games (20.2meg)

Board Games and RPGs (15.8meg)

Sports & Unreleased Games (Includes even more shareware and freeware games, as well as game demos - 13.9 meg)

Productivity & Visual Creative (both commercial software, shareware and freeware - 14.3meg)

Utilities & Aural Creative (both commercial & shareware, featuring a tonne of SoundSmith tracks and a few of my favourite MODs - 15.2meg)

Hyper Studio (pre-installed and including many, many different stacks - 14.5meg)

HyperCard IIGS (pre-installed and also includes many example stacks - 13.3meg)

Reading, Writing and Mathematics (Educational software - 15.1meg)

Science, Social Studies, Kids Creative, Computer Skills (Educational software - 14.4meg)

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!

'AMay' Answers an Apple II Creative Mayday

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:35:18 +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.

Game Interpreters: an Adventure in Themselves?

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:50:53 +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!

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

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:32:08 +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 Book of the Website

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 07:41:57 +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

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

Thu, 01 Feb 2001 14:36:31 +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...