Little Bits
By Andrew Roughan
Copyright (c) 1996 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
o The big news from July was KansasFest, the annual gathering of Apple II devotees in Kansas City. Richard Bennett attended once again this year and he will share his experiences with us at the September Apple IIgs meeting, make sure you're there! If you don't make it you'll be unlikely to hear about roasting Joe Kohn, Auri Rahimzadeh's remote control watch or who won Bite the Bag this year.
Those unable to attend can check out the unofficial web site:
http://www.woz.org/pages/kfest
The site has the conference agenda, essential Avila site map, selected Quickcam photos from each day's activities, and comments from site visitors. Check it out! Netscape 2.0 is required for the graphics, but Lynx does a great job on the text.
o I can now report that one of last months rumours actually had some basis of truth. "Gus", an Apple IIgs emulator for the Macintosh, has been a work in progress for about three years. Andy Nicholas, Dave Lyons and many other Apple employees with an interest in the Apple II have been working on this project in their spare time, which means that Gus is not an official Apple product and it has no planned release date. Gus was demonstrated at KansasFest 1996 and from the reports of the session on Genie, it was very well received. Gus currently emulates an Apple IIgs (with a few deficiencies - the serial ports and Ensoniq are not yet emulated) on a PowerPC Macintosh, however, a 'fat binary' (ie 680x0 capable) version is planned.
Gus will probably be released as an "open" beta product (meaning that anyone can participate with testing). The latest information will be made available on the following web site:
http://users.ids.net/~kerwood/gus.html
John Stiles (US MacWeek) wrote to Andy Nicholas about Gus. Andy's reply and several screen shots of Gus are available at this site:
http://www.cs.csubak.edu/~jstiles/emulator/apple2/gusinfo.html
o Wolfenstein 3D for the Apple IIgs will be released as freeware. It comes on three disks, has its own music, can be played on seven different screen sizes and a 9mhz accelerator is highly recommended! When? The old cliche... Real Soon Now!
For those who can't wait and wish to do the job themselves, the PC source code to Wolfenstein 3D is publicly available at: http://www.idsoftware.com/text/archive.html
o Dates for KansasFest 1997 have already been announced. Avila dormitory accommodation is available from July 30 to August 3, with the conference on July 31, August 1 & 2. Mark your calendars now!
o Digisoft are reworking the original Golden Orchard CD to have one ProDOS partition and one HFS partition. This rearrangement has lost 150MB of space (due to larger block sizes on the larger partition) so it will not be exactly the same. The price of the original version has dropped to US$60 which includes shipping and a jewel case.
Jim Maricondo is planning to release the second CD during Spring.
digisoft@hypermall.com
o Mike Westerfield of The ByteWorks is hosting a System 6.0.1.1 bulletin board area on Genie aimed at gathering information on bugs for "the first Apple II community update to the Apple II system software." There are numerous topics for identifying Reference inconsistencies, Toolbox and operating system bugs, for discussing related issues and hopefully some possible enhancements. Mike has undertaken to periodically combine the information for release in a similar format as the Programmer's References. Your help with identifying problems with Apple released material is requested and encouraged. You can forward your observations to Mike for inclusion on the bulletin board - place System 6.0.1.1 in the subject.
byteworks@genie.com

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