The History of the Apple II as a Gaming Platform

Matt Barton writes "Gamasutra is running a feature on the venerable Apple II platform, which practically defined the early home computer industry and was home to many of the greatest games and developers of all time. The authors discuss the platform's lifespan and many iterations, struggles with illegal distribution, and legendary Apple II games such as Prince of Persia, John Madden Football, and Ultima. 'How big of a problem was piracy? Although several software authors claim that they stopped developing games because of rampant piracy and the subsequent loss of revenue, piracy did expose more computer owners to more games than they otherwise would have been -- this was at a time before ubiquitous demos made it easier to "try before you buy." Another benefit of this piracy is that much of the software archived today at online repositories are the cracked versions.'"

The good old days

That brings back memories of junior high school, and playing cracked versions of various arcade games (complete with signature opening screens) on the school's Apple //e machines. Not to mention 'hacking' the 5-1/4 SS floppies to get cheap DS usage. While today's games are certainly graphically superior, in many ways they've gotten to be somewhat pedestrian compared to the excitement of playing Dig Dug or Conan on the green monitors.

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I actually just finished getting a working one together and giving to my girlfriend and her suitemates. It defined a lot of elementary childrens' computer experiences and was actually my first computer as well. Even when I was looking up various informatio

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Locksmith 3.0 FTW!

Re:The good old days

in many ways they've gotten to be somewhat pedestrian compared to the excitement of playing Dig Dug or Conan on the green monitors.

It occurs to me the reason we don't excited about games the way we did when we first played Pong, or messed around with early Apples and C64s is because back then, this was all cutting-edge stuff and very non-mainstream. We were doing cool shit that almost nobody else knew about. In the days before the NES and Sega Master system, I could count people I knew who played videogames on one hand.

Nowadays, everybody and his cousin owns at least a couple piece of hardware able to play games, even if it's just a low-spec PC and a cellphone, and most games tend to basically be point releases, incremental upgrades designed to suck up your spare cash, not try anything new.

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Maybe this is just nostalgia talking, but a lot of games back then were just plain fun. I recently dug out my Apple IIc and was amazed that a lot of my floppies still worked. After playing a few games, they seem to have a character that's lacking in toda

Let's not forget...

The original Castle Wolfenstein.

Achtung! Damn exploding treasure chests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Wolfenstein [wikipedia.org]

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Or it's successor, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein!

HALT! KOMMEN ZIE!!

AUS PASS?

AUS PASS?

*fires shot*

AYEEEEEEEE!!!!

The best part of the games was, of course, the speech synthesis, which was revolutionary at the time. The games were creatively designed and a lot

Can't we get the name right?

It's an Apple ][ - those brackets are absolutely necessary. Trust me.

Now get off my lawn, and don't come back until you can code in 6502 machine language hex codes - I don't want any of you assembly language sissies hanging around here.

Favorite emulator...

I'm curious how many got into programming because of ...

  * "I wonder how this game works..." or
  * "How do I remove the copy protection..."
  * "How do I cheat..." ;-) The 6502 was a nice CPU where one person could not only memorize all the opcodes, but understand the whole machine.

I'm a little biased *cough*, but there is a a half-decent emulator (with mockingboard support) available at http://applewin.berlios.de/

Gaming genres were defined in the '80s. I would highly recommend checking these out:

* Anything by Br0derbund! (Lode Runner, Drol, Spare Change, Captain Goodnight, Carmen Sandiago)
* Ultima series
* Anything by the "Beagle Bros" for just plain hacking fun

--
*C600G

My brain hurts!

Anything by the "Beagle Bros" for just plain hacking fun

Ah! That took me back so fast, my brain is whiplashed. Painful.

I loved the Beagle Bros. They had some of the *coolest* hacks. I learned more about the Apple system from them than from anywhere else. Between Beagle Bros and the Sweet-16 mini-assembler (no more hand assembling! yes!), the Apple ][ was the *greatest* platform for budding programmers.

When people claim Microsoft started the computer revolution, I laugh gently, pat them on the head, and say, "Ah, you're so *cute*." The Apple ][ started it, followed by all the others: Commodore, Atari, Tandy, etc. *Those* were the days.

Not that I'd go back. I do like where we're at today (though we should've been here 10 years ago).

Confessions of a "pirate"

My first computer was an Apple IIc. I came from a lower middle class family and it was a sacrifice for my mother to buy the machine for me second-hand. She did it because she recognized my passion and wanted me to have the opportunity to pursue it. But there was no way my family could afford to buy any software, really, much less games at $50 a pop.

Over the course of a couple of years I "acquired" two disk files full of software, much of it games. I paid for blank disks out of money I earned mowing lawns and such. I also accumulated a stack of magazines mostly donated by a teacher who took an interest in my interest and whose husband had an Apple II and a couple subscriptions.

Long story short, I'm running two IT-based businesses today and I'm grateful for a mother that cared, a teacher (and her husband) that cared and "pirate" software. No one lost anything from my "piracy" because there was absolutely ZERO chance that I ever would have been able to buy any of the software or half of the magazines that I had available to me back then.

All of that combined has defined the life I now lead and today I both give away software under OSS licenses and willingly pay for any commercial software that I use.

The joys of Apple // piracy

Some years ago the author of the Atarisoft rendition of "Mario Bros" for the Apple // was writing about the title in a Usenet post, saying that Atarisoft never released the game yet it was leaked and everyone had it... and for that reason, he was still able to list it on his resume. :) That's gotta be weird, everyone knows your work yet you didn't get paid properly for it.

Loderunner definitely made the Apple // a gaming platform, as did Wizardry.

I REPENT

I was a good kid. But that's not really true. There was a moral ambiguity. My dad brought home an Apple ][+ in 1978 - and I was hooked. As soon as I discovered copy protection, I became disturbed. Why could a friend have a game and we couldn't share? I'd already started learning BASIC and 6502 machine language; but it didn't take me long to figure out how to "copy" something that wasn't meant to be copied. Disk duplication software was unreliable. Removal of the protection was the only way. And who did it really hurt...

Some people pirated software. They collected it like baseball cards. Along comes an awkward teenager. All of a sudden, he has purpose and is "popular." Trading and playing software becomes less interesting than removal of protection. And notoriety does wonders for ego.

You get an aliases. Alien, MicroMuncher, Optimus Prime and the Evil Sock... just to name a few (all the same person.) And the art and science of computing starts being applied to your evil deeds. It also leeds you to competition with other aliases that become friends; MicroManiac, and the Saint to name a couple. Removing protection isn't good enough. Things need to work exactly like the original. Something that fits on a disk (with potentially a foreign OS) must now be reduced to a file. And it must save high scores, or get you to the next level. Self loading software of minimum size. And then the glorious splash page! The fun of graphic arts and animation; sometimes the quality of which is better than the games its plastered over.

For example... Dan Gorlin writes Airheart. A truly revolutionary game. And a revoluationary protection scheme. 18 sectors - and too much data to put on a single disk. What is a cracker to do? Re-write the OS to support block compression of course on a standard 16 sector format.

Then a brutal realization as you enter adulthood. What if someone did that to you? Every excuse you had to copy or crack is recognized as an excuse. You feel bad. You wish you had written games instead of breaking them. You even go so far as to seek forgiveness from people who were truly exceptional. To create - that is the best you can do.

Every time I see the old monikers I feel like crap. Going over asimov and noting the only reason certain software survives because YOU did something immoral - its like a WALL OF SHAME. I hang my head and punish myself a little more. I have nothing but reverance for the 8-bit pioneers and gaming gods.

Arcade conversions

In Chicago in 1981 I found it very easy to get hired to copy arcade games for the Apple, Atari, and C64 (all 6502). Roklan and Image Producers hired me to do Berzerk and Wizard of Wor (one was supposedly for Microsoft). There was no training or local expertise available, you just had to reverse engineer them. Then Atari(?) successfully sued somebody for a PacMan ripoff, and the whole bubble quickly burst...

The Apple ][ was infamous for the bizarre layout of the graphics memory (supposedly Woz chose it to save a chip, or maybe a layer on the circuit board). And if the high bit was set, all the pixels in that byte shifted, creating the other two available colors.

I found a hidden 'Hot Coffee' style easter egg in the text strings for Sierra's 'Wizard and the Princess'-- the placeholder text for the default/generic "I don't know how to **** something" reply was the f-word (never displayed)...

Re:Apple II? Gaming platform?

Hey, tard. Did you read the article.

[Gamasutra's A History of Gaming Platforms series continues with a look at the Apple II system. Perhaps best-remembered for its ubiquity in U.S. classrooms in the 1980s, the computer was also a popular gaming system. Need to catch up? Check out the first two articles in the series, covering the Commodore 64 and the Vectrex.]

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TFA much?

[Gamasutra's A History of Gaming Platforms series continues with a look at the Apple II system. Perhaps best-remembered for its ubiquity in U.S. classrooms in the 1980s, the computer was also a popular gaming system. Need to catch up? Check out th

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How about Ultima I, released in 1980? The VIC-20 wasn't released until 1981, and Ultima I didn't make it to the 64 until 1986.

Re:Apple II? Gaming platform?

The C64 was released in August, 1982. The Vic 20 Jan 1981. The Vic was cassette only until 1982 and took 20 minutes to load a program. The PET I used had 4k of RAM and AWFUL games (with a max of 8k RAM, hard to do much).

oh, where to begin... these are some of my earliest Apple ][ memories
The Oregon Trail (1970s, diskette version mid '80s)
Odyssey: The Comleat Apventure (1980) - written in integer BASIC, not MS-BASIC
Ultima I (1980)
Zork I (1980)
Zork II (1981)
Sneakers (1981)
Sabotage (1981)
Gorgon (1981)
Space Eggs (1981)
Castle Wolfenstein (1981)
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981 - and Hi Werdna!)
Softporn Adventure (1981) [text - graphical update became Leisure Suit Larry] - had to throw that in ;)
maybe Aztek (may have been 1982...)

I didn't say Akalabeth (prequel to Ultima 1979-80) because I personally found it very unfun, but it was entertaining until I starved for the 300th time. Also the Prisoner (1980?), which some people liked, but I didn't.

Re:Apple II? Gaming platform?

My first computer was two rocks and a stick. It had only one game, called two rocks and a stick. The expansion module, three rocks and a stick, was too expensive.

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Why does every computer "historian" ALWAYS forgets Commodore 64?

Ultimas all the way to Ultima VI was available on C-64.

1) The C64 was popular but not very historical -- it came out late in 8-bit history -- it came out in 1982. The Apple ][ came out in 1977

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] CALL -151
* 300: AD 30 C0 20 ED FD 4C 00 03
* 300G

This is:

300: LDA $C030 ; Toggle the speaker
303: JSR $FDED ; Print (random) contents of accumulator to screen
306: JMP $0300 ; And start all over again

Makes a wonderful visual clickfest on your screen t

Re:Best Games

why not just play them in your web browser? [virtualapple.org]

Re:Best Games

I like how I can't play the Virtual Apple games on Safari.

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It was called "Stun Copter". It has it's own Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Copter [wikipedia.org] and.... It's been released for OS X! http://antell.com/software/games.html [antell.com]

Anyone with any leads on New World ROMS so I can fire up and install OS 9 or somethin

Re:Original Cracked

I know what you are saying, and agree with you to a large extent, but as a former 6502 hacker I am not sure you understand what you are talking about.

The majority of the copy protection routines on the Apple //e depended on nuances of a combination of hardware and software not just software. Disk reading routines were able to be controlled in software -- copy protected games would not include standard apple "DOS" but essentially invent their own disk reading routines. In order to copy a disk, you would have to get extra memory, try to load the program into it using its own disk reading routine, find the starting location of the program, remap this into a format that could fit on a normal disk, and then save it back to a disk (using a standard DOS loaded into your extra memory.) Some methods of protection altered the write timing cycles on the disk, varying sector timing / size, etc. In general you would need, to unprotect disks, a hardware-modified //e with extra memory.

Something that changes the read/write timing of a disk would be very, very difficult to emulate correctly, 100% of the time. A good fraction of copy-protected files could not even be made into a standard .dsk image, and thus would be most likely lost as the original magnetic media fades -- an emulator built to emulate the nuances of the hardware would probably never be built, as even getting a method to accurately read some standardized format of the original magnetic media would be difficult / impossible. Thus the original article writer's statement is correct, whether he knew the details or not...