Now, here’s something you don’t see every day. Michael J. Mahon has created the AppleCrate, a parallel computer comprised of eight Apple IIe motherboards running on Mahon’s NadaNet network. From Mahon’s site:

In 1996, I began thinking about how one might network Apple II computers using only its built-in serial I/O: the pushbutton inputs and the annunciator outputs, and wondered what could be done with such a network. I have worked intermittently on this project over the intervening years, more frequently since I have retired. This document describes its current state.

The possibility of creating a useful network using only wire and software was esthetically appealing. Because it initially required no hardware other than the connecting wires, I dubbed it “NadaNet” (“nada” is Spanish for “nothing”). It was an interesting challenge to design an Ethernet-like network from the ground up. The exercise provided an experimental vehicle to illuminate the various issues and tradeoffs in creating and using such a network. It also became a tool for exploring various higher-level applications of networking, such as client-server and parallel computing.

To add more processors and save space, I decided that I would package several Apple //e main boards together, without keyboards or peripheral slot cards. I settled on a wooden cube about one foot on a side which I slotted to hold up to 8 main boards.

A rather impressive piece of work. How many IIe motherboards would it take to outperform VA Tech’s Terascale 1100 node Xserve G5 supercluster?

Most every day I take a look at the first few pages of auction items in eBay’s Vintage Computing area. There’s always interesting relics to be found, but it’s rare that a real treasure jumps off the page. Recently, I found such a treasure. Jason Harper was selling off his author’s copy of an action game he ported to the Apple IIgs known as Airball. This is how the auction item started off:

A long time ago, on a platform far, far away… I wrote an Apple IIgs version of MichTron/Microdeal’s popular Airball adventure game, which had also been ported to the Amiga and PC. It was this publisher’s only IIgs title; they had no idea how to market it, and gave up after selling only 144 copies. All I had to show for a few months’ effort was one pitiful royalty check, and two author’s copies of the game. I gave one of those to a friend long ago, the other one has been sitting on a shelf since then. It’s unopened, in the original shrink-wrap, although the top seam in the wrap has split open (actually, I think it might have been that way when I received it). It’s been years since I had a working IIgs system, and in all that time I’ve never even bothered to set up an emulator to run any of the software I wrote, so there’s obviously no point in holding on to this any longer.

This really jumped out at me for several reasons. First, Jason Harper was somewhat of a legend in the Apple IIgs scene for a variety of applications he wrote in the mid ’80s, most famous of which was SHR Convert (which later evolved into SuperConvert), an image conversion application that had to be the most popular piece of shareware ever written for the machine. Second, I’ve always loved the game Airball. I was an Atari 520ST user just before I got my GS and one of the best games for that machine was Airball from MichTron, a native ST title. Gameplay, graphics, music—it was all there. Several years later we saw a GS version floating around on the BBS’s, but it appeared in no ads, stores, or mailorder catalogs. The assumption was that a full port for the GS had been underway, but the project must have gotten scrapped before it hit market. As it turns out, this wasn’t quite the case.

I bid and won the auction for this game [ see box photos here: front, back ] and Jason was kind enough to answer a few questions I posed with regards to his work on this project:

Me: I can’t believe MichTron (Microdeal) rolled it out and did such a poor job of pushing it. Did they make any formal announcement at all?

JH: Not that I know of. I forgot to mention in the description that they later sold some copies to some IIgs dealer – Big Red Computer Club, maybe? (it’s been too long to remember.) I don’t know if those copies were part of the 144 that I actually got royalties for, by the time I heard of this that company had gone out of business.

Me: Would you mind telling me if it was a C or asm project?

JH: Assembly, both the original and the port (that was probably true of every arcade-style game of the era).

Me: Airball has a really nice audio track. Is the music identical to either the ST or Amiga version?

JH: It’s using the music data directly from the ST version – I have no idea if the Amiga version was the same, I never saw it. However, I ignored some note envelope data, as the music sounded identical to my ears without it (and it would have been a lot of work, and slowed the game down, to interpret that data).

Me: Any other comments you can give on the project, just for general interest?

JH: The only other major detail I remember is that the game ended up working quite differently internally than the ST version, due mostly to the rather different organization of pixels with the graphics memory on the two platforms. I did it their way at first, and the game was far too slow, so I rewrote it using a complete Z-buffer to handle the display of the airball that can be partially obscured by objects in the room. That turned out too slow as well, and the amount of work needed to speed it up would probably have been sufficient to fix the original method, but I was too committed to the Z-buffer approach by the time I realized that. The memory needed for the Z-buffer meant that the game couldn’t run on a 512K machine as the ST version could, but that probably would have been the case anyway since I was running the game under an operating system (the ST version booted directly into the game, and couldn’t be quit other than by a reboot).

I had such high hopes of porting their Time Bandits game as well. However, communication with MichTron was always difficult – they never seemed to grasp the fact that if I asked them a question, there was an implied request that they actually answer that question…

Me: Are you still coding these days?

JH: Yes, although mainly for microcontrollers (embedded systems) these days, along with the circuit design and printed circuit board layout needed to support that work.

It’s great to have had a few words with this GS developer of yore and also to have come into posession of so rare an artifact from that period. This is definitely one of the most prized items in my collection.

Airball exists for the Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIgs, IBM PC, NES (never officially released), and the Gameboy Advance (unofficial port). The eBay auction item can be seen for the next 90 days or so here. To read the rest of Jason’s auction posting, which describes the game itself, click the link below.

Continue reading →

It seems Retro Gamer magazine, which I spoke of a while back, has added a few seconds to my allotted 15 minutes of fame. I’ll explain how. In issue 10 there is a nice, 10-page article about the Apple IIgs [ pics of my IIgs ] that reveals a wide range of historical facts and trivia. It’s a great read complete with many color photos and it’s most pleasing to see a machine that figured so prominently in my past put back in the spotlight. One area where the article is a bit misleading, however, is in its description of the IIgs as a 16-bit machine akin to the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.

While the IIgs has graphics capabilities more or less similar to those machines, and audio hardware more powerful than either, strictly speaking the IIgs is an 8-bit machine. The Amiga/ST employ the Motorola 68000 CPU which is a 16/32-bit CPU, in that it uses 32-bit internal registers but sits on a 16-bit data bus through which it communicates with the outside world. At the heart of the IIgs lies a WDC 65C816 processor which is an 8/16-bit CPU, in that it has 16-bit internal registers, but sits on an 8-bit data bus. The only way one could consider the IIgs to be a 16-bit machine is if the internal CPU architecture alone is being referenced, and from that point of view the Amiga/ST become 32-bit machines.

At any rate, feeling the matter needed to be clarified, I sent an e-mail to the editor that described the above…and promptly forgot the matter. Several weeks later I was paging through issue 11 when I came across a letter to the editor which was pointing out this inaccuracy. I began to read with interest, as I recalled that the same inaccuracy had bugged me when I read the original article. (I still did not recall that I had written in about it.) It wasn’t until about half-way through the piece that I was so struck by this reader laying out point after point that I had wanted to make, that I jumped to the end to see who it could be. Shock and surprise—it was me! There was my e-mail, in full, complete with a link to this site.

I guess between this printing, my inclusion in The Cult of Mac, and the NY Times appearance from ’99, I am on my way to stardom….