Tag: Brendan Robert

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

Posted on by Quinn Dunki

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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 #45 (March 2015): Mark Kriegsman, FastLED, Transwarp GS Clone, and Newsapalooza

Open Apple #45 (March 2015): Mark Kriegsman, FastLED, Transwarp GS Clone, and Newsapalooza

Posted on by Quinn Dunki

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This month on Open Apple, we sit down with Mark Kriegsman, author of Star Blaster, and a modern Apple II hacker. He has ported the awesome FastLED driver library to the Apple II, so you can drive many hundreds of 32-bit RGB LEDs with your Apple II.

Meanwhile, we browbeat people into attending KansasFest, we rationalize our shame at developing on emulators, we talk dead tree easter eggs, we make terrible awesome BASIC & Twitter puns, we talk about post-mortem collecting, and Mike generates hate mail. Just in case you’re not completely over movies about Steve Jobs, we talk about one of those as well. Yawn.

More importantly, help us convince Mark to build a lo-res display from FastLEDs and bring it to KansasFest.

Once again, in case you missed it, the dates for KansasFest 2015 have been announced. July 14-19! Go to http://www.kansasfest.org to register. Then pull up a comfy chair and enjoy this super-sized episode of Open Apple. Apologies for some audio quality issues in this month. Quinn had some equipment difficulties and Mike has been under the weather. Thanks for your patience. Stay tuned until the end of the show for a special treat (not just Mike’s usual cheeky outtake)!

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

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Open Apple #38 (August 2014) : The Lawless Legends Team

Posted on by Quinn Dunki

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This month on Open Apple, we go deep on Lawless Legends with most of the team building it. We’ve managed to corner Seth Sternberger (of 8-bit Weapon fame), Martin Haye, and Brendan Robert (Dave Schmenk, we’re coming for you…) to grill them on this amazing effort. We also wish a fond farewell to co-host Ken Gagne, and welcome our new co-host Quinn Dunki. Listeners can look forward to more angry sarcasm and less professionalism here on Open Apple. Of course, we also ramble some more about KansasFest 2014. Because KansasFest.

Lawless Legends is a new wild west RPG game being built cross-platform for classic 8-bit computers, and possibly a few modern machines as well. Among its many outstanding features are a 2.5D free-roaming raycast engine, mipmapping, sprites, a high-level scripting language, and full modern pipeline for creating art and design elements. We gather up as many of the team as we can muster and pick their brains about how the game is coming along. We go deep into the process of building it, and take some cheap shots at Commodore along the way. It’s okay though, by the time their machines finish loading, this will all be ancient history.

More information on everything mentioned in the show can be found after the jump.

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