29/08/2020: Good News and Bad News...

There's good news and bad news.

First, the good news: Qkumba has begun applying his talents for wrangling software to work in ways never originally designed, and we now have new hard drive installable versions of Alien Mind, Dream Zone and Transylvania III.

Alien Mind works fine if you boot into ProDOS 8 from any configuation with the san inc pack. This has the advantage over the older Balmerpeak Smartport Edition in that you can now easily play this from any mass storage volume on a IIGS (whereas before it was really only convenient for the CFFA3000). Qkumba's still tweaking it to work under any configuation to work from GS/OS as well – it may work for your configuration, or it may not (it doesn't work for my two IIGS setups, a ROM01 with a Transwarp GS + CFFA3000 and a ROM3 with a ZipGS + CFFA3K). A good trick you may not know is if you hold the 8 key down while booting System 6.0.x, it will bypass loading GS/OS and quickly boot to ProDOS 8 and take you to the BASIC prompt. From there, you can type BYE, and you'll either go to the old PrODOS launcher or the newer Bitsy Bye launcher (with ProDOS 8 v2.4.x) and you can launch ProDOS 8 applications from there.

Another ProDOS 8 game you'll need to load this way is Transylvania III – it's now playable from mass storage, but it is completely incompatible with GS/OS.

And lastly, Dream Zone, Naughty Dog's second ever game after Ski Crazed, is now mass storage friendly, so enjoy more convenient play of this IIGS original game from GS/OS (any System version should work from ProDOS 16 v1.3 onwards).

All games have Qkumba's san inc disk images attached to their individual archives – see links above attached to each title. I've also added them to my 32meg volumes – Dream Zone lives on the  Adventure and Simulation Games volume, but Alien Mind (if you restore game 8 from this volume you'll be on the last level, but you now have maximum health, so once you're through this challenging level you may have enough hit points to best the alien at the end and win!) and Transylvania III are on the  Games with Path Modifications volume, as there's no room left on the Action or Adventure Games volumes.

Now, onto the bad news. What is the Apple IIGS?, in its third incarnation, has been runnnig for 12 years now and some of its dependencies are no longer supported in a near future server update. So the site is going to go static while we update to newer versions of back end things and fix what's going to break before going live again. In the meantime, I may be able to update .zip files for 32meg volumes and individual archives howver, so as more Qkumba conversions come in, I'll let everyone know via Facebook and Twitter.