Online Apple IIGS Emulator!!!

Last Apple post, I swear. But this is the greatest thing ever. Found on boing boing, someone's ported an Apple IIGS emulator and stuck it inside an ActiveX control, so you can run it in your Internet Explorer window. (no firefox) And he's also collected a ton of disk images of both Apple //e and Apple IIGS software, mostly games.

This includes the greatest puzzle game ever, I.O. Silver (Direct link to play the game) by Beagle Bros.

The object of I.O. Silver was to push the blocks around so that you pushed all the blocks of the same colour into each other, in order to clear the screen. Figuring out the solution for a particular level to reduce down to just one block probably involves NP-completeness in some way. Also, while all that's going on you have to worry about a timer and not getting zapped by the little bugs that are buzzing around, which you can trap between blocks if you time your punches right, or kill by trapping them in between two blocks of the same colour as they get pushed together.



I'd nearly forgotten how awesome this game was.

Here's a blurb about Beagle Bros from Wikipedia:

Beagle Bros

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Beagle Bros was a software company that specialized in creating personal computing products that were both useful and whimsical. Their primary focus was on the Apple II family of computers.

Beagle Bros (the lack of a period at the end is intentional) was founded in 1980 by Bert Kersey and expanded over the years to include a wide variety of staff members, programmers, and designers. Whereas most software companies focused on professional users and business systems, Kersey founded the company with the intention of supporting the "hobbyist" computer users that had appeared when affordable personal computers were made available to the general public.

As a result, much of the Beagle Bros product line consists of software that put the creative power in the hands of the user or expanded popular products of other companies. Apple Mechanic allowed users to create their own shape tables (an early form of sprites) to create their own games, BeagleWorks was a series of add-on tools for the Apple version of WordPerfect.

When the Apple IIGS was released, Beagle Bros was among the first companies to release high-quality packages that took full advantage of that computer's capabilities. Both Platinum Paint GS and BeagleWrite GS are still regarded as among the high points of commercial IIGS software.

Perhaps the most memorable aspect of Beagle Bros was their use of vintage woodcut art in their print material. While many computer and software companies in the 1980s aimed for more "flashy" logos and appearances, Beagle Bros cultivated a nostalgic, almost "down-home" feel. This was in keeping with their intended mission of creating software that was user-friendly and welcoming to inexperienced computer owners that might have been more than a little frightened of their new machine.

Humor permeated Beagle Bros products, even extending to the warning label printed on their 5.25" disk jackets. Unlike most disk care labels, which warned that magnets, water, and temperature could damage disks, Beagle Bros' warning icons admonished users not to use their disks as kites, fold them into paper airplanes, or feed them to alligators.

Another delight were the "one-liner" computer programs that peppered Beagle Bros print media. Each new magazine advertisement or mailer held one or more Applesoft BASIC programs tucked away in speech balloons or whitespace. These were always extremely short yet extremely clever little programs that showcased unusual tricks or capabilities of the Apple II. At first these were written by the Beagle Bros programmers, later, their users began submitting their own. As a result, almost every Beagle Bros release came with a selection of these "miniprograms" either on disk or in the box inserts.

The end of an age came in 1991 when Beagle Bros owner Mark Simonsen licensed the Beagle Bros Apple II line to Quality Computers. BeagleWorks was licensed to WordPerfect Corporation the following year. At last report, Quality Computers was still offering Beagle Bros software for sale.

Many former "Beaglers" have continued to be involved in the creative software industry; for example, Joe Holt is one of the authors of iMovie.

Damn that's cool. Some more games I had as a kid for this thing were (click on the links to play them, you'll need to agree to install the ActiveX control in IE) Arkanoid II (amazing graphics and sound, remember this is from the days of the NES), Jungle Hunt, Marble Madness GS
, Gnarly Golf, and the super-awesome (and sprite-intensive) Rastan. A great adventure game was Deja Vu (which I remember from NES) That one also boots into the GS/OS system software, sort of like the Mac OS, only it had a few things they didn't add to Mac OS until about version 6 or 7.


(Click to enlarge)

For a real computer nerd getting to re-live your first machine is sort of like getting to have sex with kiss your first girlfriend all over again.

The other fun trick with the IIGS was that it had a BASIC interpreter built right into the ROM, so all you had to do was hit Control-Reset and you could write BASIC. I remember all the old computer magazines always had program listings for C=64, and I had to not only copy them out, but had to change the code so that it would work with AppleSoft's version of BASIC. God that was a pain in the arse, but I loved it when I got them to work.