Groovy hepcat Paul Guertin was jivin' in comp.sys.apple2 on Thu, 7 May
2026 01:48 pm. It's a cool scene! Dig it.
On Thu, 5 Feb 2026 02:47:04 -0000 (UTC), bikliadik2071 <bikliadik2071@gmail.com> wrote:
I have them, but I haven't used them lately.
Glad to meet you all here.
I have a few Apple II computers that still work well, but I
mostly use emulators.
I'm still using my old Apple 2c. I recently bought a smartport
micro-SD card adaptor. I've installed a couple of downloaded .po hard
drive images on it, and am working my way through the games on them to
see which ones are good to play. (All too few, I'm afraid!)
Although one of the images doesn't seem to be working. It's not
booting. I'll have to look into that.
And I can't seem to access the images at all from ProDOS booted from
the internal floppy drive. I'll have to look into that too.
I teach computer science in college, and this term, as the
capstone project in a computer architecture course where
students built their own 4-bit computer from 74LS chips,
they are using Merlin to program a lo-res Apple II game in
assembly language. For most of them, it's their first contact
with 8-bit development, and after a crash course in 6502
architecture, I gave them a bunch of manual scans and
told them to get to work!
Sweet! You can get alot out of assembly programming, getting down to
the nitty-gritty of the machine, learning what makes it tick and how to
make it do what you want it to. The old hardware makes this a not insurmountable task.
A while back I was writing a graphics/games library in assembly. I've
got sidetracked (as I frequently do) on other projects, and haven't got
back to that yet. But I will someday.
It's a pleasure seeing them discover assembly programming.
They really enjoy it and some of them are putting long
hours into their program .I'm seeing Minesweeper, Pong,
a text mode Geometry Dash, Space Invaders, Snake, and
more.
Anyone come up with original ideas?
No doubt some teams are using AI to get some help but
that's fine, as long as they can explain their program to
the class -- there are orals at the end of the term in a
couple weeks.
As long as they understand what they're doing, not just copy-pasting,
they should be alright.
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