Open Apple #75 (October 2017) – Seth Sternberger, Class Apples, GS Graphics

We’re baaaack! Sorry for the unscheduled hiatus folks, but your intrepid hosts had some family matters to attend to. This month on Open Apple, we sit down with Seth Steinberger of 8-bit Weapon. We talk about their new album Class Apples, which was made entirely on an Apple II. Yes, every sound on the album is generated by real Apple II hardware with no add-on cards. Apple IIs can make good sound with the right software and in the hands of a talented musician.

After the amazement of Class Apples wears off, we get into Seth’s background with Apple IIs, how he got interested in electronic music, how 8-bit Weapon came to be, and where they’re headed next. We touch a little bit on his work as the main artist on the upcoming RPG Lawless Legends, and Seth explains how much better keyboards are as compared to proms. Furthermore, we all agree that the primary value of the internet is to find pictures of Devo. Michelle wasn’t able to be on the show, but you won’t want to miss the story of how she got to work with Mark Mothersbaugh.

Mike and Quinn then get into augmented reality, alternative operating systems, and of course Richard Garriot. Can’t have an Apple II show without mentioning Richard Garriot. Stay tuned to hear about accelerator control, new magazines, and making your own memory cards.

Lastly, Quinn goes deep on how to program fast graphics on the notoriously “crippled” Apple IIgs. Yes, you can do big beautiful sprites at high frame rates. Learn all about the deep dark secrets that the best games and demos used.

Help keep the Garage Giveaway running at KansasFest! Donate here to keep it a thing. It’s one of the greatest services the Apple II community has, and we’re going to lose it this year if we don’t get donations.

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

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

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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Open Apple #31 (Oct 2013): Brendan Robert, Lawless Legends, Texas, and Wayne Green

Brendan Robert

This month on Open Apple, Mike and Ken chat with Brendan Robert of the Java Apple Computer Emulator (JACE) and Apple Game Server. Innovative cross-platform tools are being used to bring Lawless Legends, an original 8-bit RPG, to the Apple II and Commodore 64; as part of the programming team, Brendan takes us behind the scenes. He lives in a lawless land himself — the Old West of Texas, where gaming icons Ion Storm, Zynga, Lord British, and Rooster Teeth reside. But when it comes to games, sometimes you can’t do better than Tetris, of which there are many new and devious deviations. We get rid of old toys, like a SCSI CD-ROM 7-disc changer and a LANceGS card, so we can all have room for new toys, like A2CLOUD, Apple2Pi, BenchmarkeD, AppleIIWorks Envoy, and Final Cut Pro X. And sadly, Wayne Green of InCider and Byte has passed away; we remember his magazines fondly.

Click past the jump for links mentioned in this episode.

Introduction (0:00 – 11:50)

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