Open Apple #65 (November 2016) : Alex Lee, What Is The Apple IIgs?

This month on Open Apple, we sit down with Alex Lee, purveyor of the canonical IIgs reference site What Is The Apple IIgs?  We talk about what it was like being one of the brave few with this machine, and that feeling of living in a secret world of incredible graphics and sound that nobody else seemed to know about.

Alex walks us through the history of IIgs emulators, and all the ways that the IIgs Finder was actually better than the Mac. He also talks about the legal challenges of running an archive site like this, which luckily are not too serious for this obscure machine. We finish up with talk of the future of the site, and the difficulty of finding some really rare software packages- help contribute content!

Alex is also working on an Apple IIgs coffee table book. Help encourage him to finish it, because we all want to buy it very very badly. Just saying.

Keep listening, because you won’t want to miss Alex casually dropping the phrase “Late nineties and early naughties” in his charming Australian accent. Tune in as well to pine along with Quinn for the never-to-be Ultima VI.

Our apologies for this episode being a bit late. Combinations of illness, holiday commitments, and technical difficulties all conspired against us this month.

More information on everything discussed in this episode, after the jump.

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Open Apple #63 (September 2016) : Kate Szkotnicki, ProDOS 2.4, KansasFest

This month on Open Apple, we sit down with Kate Szkotnicki, long time Apple II fan and new addition to the retro community. We chat about her first impressions as a newcomer to the community, and the big splash she made at her first KansasFest. Kate is a cosplayer and frequent attendee of anime and comic cons, so she brought a very fresh set of skills and perspectives to KansasFest. Her presentation on making plastic parts (and candy!) with silicone moulding was very popular. Throw away your 3D printers- this is easier and better.

We also talk lots about John Brooks’ excellent work on updating ProDOS, Quinn says a bunch of stuff about Commodore that probably isn’t true, and Mike falls on his sword for getting everything wrong about Australian Apple II gatherings. Mike gets a record number of Apple /// references into this episode, so be sure to tune in and ignore that.

Breaking news! Between us recording and releasing this show, John Brooks has updated ProDOS to 2.4.1. Also, we worked out that the MegaBeep ROM is in fact compatible with it, contrary to the opening of the show. Listener James reported an issue that we believe was actually a bad ROM. If you are a MegaBeep owner, don’t hesitate to use it with any version of ProDOS, including John Brooks’ excellent new 2.4 updates.

Thanks to Brian Wiser of Call A.P.P.L.E. for permission to use the interview clip with Mike Harvey and John Leake.

Happy 30th birthday, Apple IIgs!

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Show #2 (Mar 2011): IvanX, VCF, VNC & GPLE

Ivan DruckerIn the second monthly episode of Open Apple, Mike and Ken are joined by Ivan Drucker: two-time KansasFest alumnus, Juiced.GS staff writer, and Mac consultant based out of New York City. News this month includes a look forward to Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) East 7.0 by two of its alumni, an Apple-1 expansion card for the Apple II, and controlling Apple II emulators via an iOS VNC; reviews of our favorite Beagle Bros programming utilities; the exorbitant prices Apple II hardware and software are fetching on eBay; and new iterations of our favorite adventure, role-playing, and text-adventure games.

Congratulations to Wade Clarke, who correctly guessed Karateka for last month’s “Name the Game” contest! His prize is a free Juiced.GS Concentrate, courtesy Juiced.GS publisher Gamebits. The prize for this month’s contest is a free two-day pass to VCF East 7.0, courtesy Evan Koblentz of MARCH.

Click past the jump for links mentioned in this episode.

Introduction (0:00 – 11:56)

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