We’ve created two new web-based interfaces for our cyanIIde Apple II webassembly emulator! The first allows you to load and edit Applesoft BASIC programs using a CodeMirror-based editor with syntax highlighting and colon line separation. [more...] | Continue reading
Make your own Christmas and holiday cards using the original Apple II version of The Print Shop with no emulators or downloads required at theprintshop.club Created by David Balsam and Martin Kahn, The Print Shop [more...] | Continue reading
cyanIIde is a subset of our microM8 Apple II emulator meant to run on lower-power systems such as the Raspberry Pi and in the browser. This page contains an early release of the WebAssembly version. [more...] | Continue reading
A new clever hack allows Apple II users to run BBC BASIC! | Continue reading
MSDOS-based versions of Microsoft Windows, such as Windows 95 and Windows 98, had notorious stability problems, due in large part to their mixing of 16-bit and 32-bit application code (in order to maintain compatibility with [more...] | Continue reading
As this issue of Paleotronic magazine is Halloween themed, being asked to write an article discussing the history of arcade horror games fits perfectly, even if you are not a big fan on the horror [more...] | Continue reading
Computer and video game companies often dive into the deep end of innovation in a bid to capture the next big thing in gaming. The driving force is revenue, profits and capturing market share from [more...] | Continue reading
While Asian manufacturers were feverishly working on perfecting videotape, American RCA was working on a videodisc system – not a laserdisc system, which did not contact the surface of the disc, but instead a system [more...] | Continue reading
There are five senses: touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing. Computers have always been tactile – you have to touch them in order to use them (at least until relatively recently.) You can twiddle knobs, [more...] | Continue reading
In today’s world of plug-and-play peripheral devices, it is difficult to understand the fundamentals of what is happening at the lower levels. How does the computer connect to the device? How does it communicate with [more...] | Continue reading
When animator Don Bluth agreed to animate an obscure laserdisc videogame tentatively titled “The Dragon’s Lair”, little did he know it would become one of his biggest successes… Dragon’s Lair… Dragon’s Lair… ah yes Dragon’s [more...] | Continue reading
The Amiga represented an evolutionary leap forward in computing’s creative potential. While colour computer graphics were not a new invention, the Amiga provided a video mode capable of displaying 4096 colours – previously unprecedented in [more...] | Continue reading
Once upon a time, in a land far away lived Jack and Jay. Jack was the Commander of an armada known as Commodore, while Jay was a Grand Wizard in the royal court of the Kingdom of Atari. | Continue reading
Today almost everyone will use a computer, or some form of computer controlled hardware to do their job. When they get home they might play games on their PC or Mac, or use social media [more...] | Continue reading
Christmas themed video games have always been a category of computer and console video gaming that has bewildered me. Often they have been very poor adaptations of a holiday season meant to bring about fond [more...] | Continue reading
My task, should I accept (and you did – Ed) was to write an article about Christmas Lemmings as a segue into Lemmings in general. The reason behind this, is simply to meet my brief [more...] | Continue reading
At the time of writing, the holidays are almost upon us. At this time of year we usually have friends over for some food, talk and games. This is where it gets a bit awkward, [more...] | Continue reading
Imagine you forked over US$30 (US$80 in 2018) or even more in Australia with its ‘luxury’ import tax for an ET cartridge to give little Johnnie for Christmas and he hated it! You would’ve been [more...] | Continue reading
(Editor’s Note: David has also created a ZX81 version of Tut-Tut which is available from his blog: https://www.zx81keyboardadventure.com/2019/10/zx81-game-tut-tut.html) It’s coming to the end of 1921’s digging season in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Your excavations have [more...] | Continue reading
Art group Mistigris is famous for its Hallowe’en and Christmas packs. We had a chat with its founder, Rowan Lipkovits aka Cthulu, about how the group started, its resurrection, and why it’s still going almost [more...] | Continue reading
Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell was facing a serious conundrum. His ‘video computer system’, a cartridge-based home video-game console designed to play versions of popular Atari arcade games, was certain to be a big hit, but [more...] | Continue reading
What could be better than connecting to another computer remotely? How about remotely connecting remotely? While these days we take the ‘always connected’ nature of our mobile phones for granted, back in the early 1980s [more...] | Continue reading
While using an on-line service like CompuServe allowed you to chat with people all around the world, its per-hour charge was not that attractive to perpetually-broke teenagers. Also, you couldn’t really go ‘hang out’ with [more...] | Continue reading
So, what if we made a really big Bulletin Board System, one that could be dialed-in to from any city, and where thousands of people could interact, rather than just a few? These days [more...] | Continue reading
So it’s fair to say we might have gone a little crazy tricking out the turtle in microM8‘s OpenGL Apple Logo implementation… New Graphical Primitives: Wireframe: Reminder: SETPC color – sets the ‘pen’ colour SETPOPA [more...] | Continue reading
While the Internet would eventually bring computer-based telecommunications to the masses, by the late 1980s more tech-savvy individuals were already meeting new people and having all sorts of discussions ‘on-line’ – and in some cases [more...] | Continue reading
You might have got the impression, upon entering Jane Smith’s house (sometime in 1986) that her husband was in the process of renovating their kitchen, the sound of a power tool growling and grinding away [more...] | Continue reading
Brøderbund Software Inc. was founded by brothers Doug and Gary Carlston in 1980 after Doug had written Galactic Empire, a space strategy game, on his TRS-80 (retro-trivia: many of the locations in the game have [more...] | Continue reading
In the early 1980s, if you wanted posters to advertise a yard sale or a party, your options were pretty limited. You could get some blank sheets of paper and some crayons or felt markers [more...] | Continue reading
Lunarcy is a fun and simple lunar lander game written in Apple Logo and compatible with microM8’s microLogo, a vector-based OpenGL re-implementation. You control a lander with a joystick (or the keyboard’s arrow keys) and you [more...] | Continue reading
Before one could land on the Moon, one needed to learn more about it. What was the surface made of? What was the terrain like? Where would we land? The Ranger missions hoped to assist [more...] | Continue reading
The Commodore 64, introduced at the 1982 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, was a significant improvement on the VIC-20, and would become the best-selling computer model of all time. In early 1981, Commodore-subsidiary MOS Technology began [more...] | Continue reading
Happy Election Eve! Over the past few years, Australian Apple II aficionado Jeremy Barr-Hyde has managed to diligently bring a number of Australian Apple II software titles back from the dead, including such downunder classics as ‘The [more...] | Continue reading
You just don’t see good old space simulators like this one for computers now-adays. If you have not heard of or played Millennium 2.2 before, it’s everything that’s good about being stuck on a lonely [more...] | Continue reading
Last issue of Paleotronic, my article on RPG games focused on the birth of RPG games on home computers. It looked at how they were heavily turn based text adventures, inspired by the likes of [more...] | Continue reading
Hidden on the back side of the Print Shop Color Apple II disk is a series of dynamic artworks by Print Shop developer Martin Kahn. They are quite something, considering the extremely primitive nature of [more...] | Continue reading
Recently we’ve had requests from users for both an API (an interface for controlling our microM8 Apple II emulator externally) and a GUI (a graphical user-interface native to the host operating system). The lack of [more...] | Continue reading
School kids today may all have tablets, but in the early 1980s you were lucky if your classroom had its own computer! More likely, there was only one (or maybe two) for the entire school. [more...] | Continue reading
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the [more...] | Continue reading
One of the hottest Christmas toys of 1979 was a lunar-inspired tank that taught rudimentary computer programming! The Milton Bradley Big Trak (also stylised as bigtrak) is a programmable toy resembling a futuristic utility vehicle [more...] | Continue reading
In the early days of computing, all computers were in effect personal computers – only one person could use them at a time! In the beginning, it was like using a calculator: you entered in [more...] | Continue reading
While researching for our magazine we sometimes find nuggets buried by time that have been forgotten by the Internet. This particular nugget was found in the May 1977 issue of Creative Computing. Science fiction author [more...] | Continue reading
A desire to have the moon walk broadcast during prime-time US viewing hours, after the moon set there, meant that NASA would have to rely on a dish in a sheep paddock in Australia to [more...] | Continue reading
The impact the live broadcast of the Moon walk had on the populace of Western countries cannot be overstated. Witnessing such a momentous event live made people feel they were a part of it, and [more...] | Continue reading
Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong’s tense two-word report came over the loudspeakers at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, more of a question than a statement as he and and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin rapidly descended [more...] | Continue reading
Sound was never the Apple II’s strong suit – designed in the mid-1970s, it came with a simple ‘beeper’ that could typically only produce simple sound effects, and certainly not music of any reasonable [more...] | Continue reading
Our tour of electronic Christmas gifts past has concluded, but if you missed it, don’t worry! You can catch up by downloading all of the episodes in a single file via the link below. Download [more...] | Continue reading