The Apple IIgs: On a Machine This Slow, You Had To Get Weird

Long-time Slashdot reader garote writes: It's the year 1991. You're a teenage computer geek. You've just upgraded to an Apple IIgs, your first '16-bit' computer. To relieve the crushing boredom of your High School coursework, you and your friends embark on the computer geek equivalent of forming a heavy metal band: Making your own video game. You meet at the benches during lunch hour, and pass around crude plans scribbled on graph paper. You assign each other impressive titles like 'Master Programmer', 'Sound Designer', and 'Area Data Input'. You swap 3.5' disks like furtive secret agents, and stay up coding untl 3am. Your parents look at your owlish eyes — and your slipping grades — and ask if you're 'on drugs'. If that sounds familiar, this essay may prove interesting. It uses the game my friends and I started — but didn't finish — in High School over 30 years ago, to explore the absurd programming contortions we did to make it playable on the Apple IIgs: The red-headed stepchild of the Apple II line; a machine that languished for six years without a hardware upgrade to avoid competing with the Macintosh. Thanks to the recent release of the first cycle-accurate emulator for this machine, you can actually play the game in all its screen-tearing glory. You can also explore the source code which has survived for 30 years, and been adapted to build on modern hardware thanks to Merlin32 and CiderPress II.

'Nowadays, the content of the game itself is only good for an embarrassing laugh,' according to the web page, 'but I feel that the code we hammered out shows the unique challenges of a bygone era, which should be remembered...'

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