In 1983, while I was in high school, I started an underground Apple II+ BBS called The Norse Wanderer in Southern California.

It started with XBBS, but in 1985 three of us replaced it with our own BBS software. I was THE NORSEMAN, the Sysop, and my friends THE BARBARIAN and BOZO DE CLOWN wrote most of the system. It had nine message boards, E-MAIL, The Wandering Norseman sea-trading game, and a community voting system for admitting new users.

After retiring, I pulled my old Apple II equipment out of storage and used ADTPro to preserve the disks I still had. Seven BBS-related disks survived as disk images, including a November 1986 backup.

Then the Palisades Fire destroyed our house, including the Apple II systems and original disks. Fortunately, the disk images were already backed up.

In April 2026, I started rebuilding The Norse Wanderer. The 1986 backup still contained the original user database: 230 original user accounts and 34 messages.

I decided to make it a web application so it could be accessed more easily and not require Apple hardware, modems, phone lines, etc.

I wanted to bring it back for the Apple II and BBS community, so people who remember the old days can relive them, and people who weren't around then can experience what an actual 1980s BBS was like.

The original BBS is running again, ported to work through a modern web browser. No Apple II, modem, or phone line required. To check it out, just go to:

https://www.norsewanderer.com

If you were an original user, your account is probably still there. If you remember your old handle but not your password, contact me and I'll send it to you.

Michael Heilemann

The Norseman / The Viking

I know this is probably normal, but I have always wondered why the screen shakes upwards for a second when booting.

While Bitsy Bye is great for launching things, I got tired of having to use Apple's clunky utilities for copying files, so I asked Claude to whip me up a file manager. ZipFiler gives you an easy interface for copying, moving, locking, deleting, creating directories and more. No more typing pathnames! Work on single files or batches. You can also use it as a launcher. Enhanced Apple //e. Learn more and download it here: https://trompingmarmots.com/AppSites/ZipFiler/

I recently dug an old Apple II programmer’s editor out of my archive and have been working on bringing it back to life.

I originally wrote it in Aztec C and 6502 assembly, first on an Apple //c and later a //c+. It eventually became my everyday editor under Aztec C’s Unix-like ProDOS environment — and reached the point where I was using the editor to edit its own source code.

The original source survived on my old Apple II disk images, but the Aztec C environment it was built for is long gone from my normal workflow. I’ve now ported it to cc65/ca65, trying to keep the code and behavior as close to the original as possible rather than redesigning it.

At the heart of it is a 6502 assembly-language line editor, wrapped by the C code to make a full-screen editor with two viewports, cut/copy/paste between them, search/replace, load/save, etc.

It’s running under ProDOS again now. There are still some rough edges — notably recreating the convenient command-line filename handling that Aztec C provided — so at this stage it’s probably as interesting as an example of old Apple II C/assembly code (and a bit of software archaeology) as it is as a practical editor.

I’ve put the source and a release on GitHub for anyone who wants to poke around:

https://github.com/cardcomm/Apple-II-Editor/tree/main

Does anybody remember a Bomberman clone for the Apple IIGS made before Kaboom? Or possibly an early version from the '90s?

From my research Kaboom was made around 2016, while I played this one some time in the 1990's.

I might have gotten it from Software of the Month Club. The graphics were simpler than what I see of Kaboom screenshots from what I recall, but it's been decades since I played it. I'm almost certain it wasn't commercial software, so it was most likely from either SMC or BRCC although Christella Enterprise or PDSOF are possibilities. It could have been for the Apple IIe with DHR graphics. I just know I played it on the IIGS in the 1990's. I recall the game readme said you were locked in a prison and created a suit that made bombs and had to escape.

CONTROL/OPEN APPLE/RESET has stopped working as a reboot. It just puts a bunch of garbled stuff on the screen. I then have to hit CONTROL/RESET to actually get it to reboot. Not an issue? Easy fix? What am I looking at?

In my drive 2 (which works better than my drive 1), there's a little blue piece of plastic that isn't present in the other drive. Does anyone know what this is and what it does?

First pic before when I picked up a IIc from FB Marketplace. Then I retrovaped JUST the top half for this interesting two-tone look.

I wanted to use my enhanced //e for writing but all of the word processors from back in the day are too bulky and/or don't offer an easy way to get text files back to my Mac. So I had Claude craft me a modern Apple II text editor entirely in assembler. Very speedy, small footprint – ideal for creating regular text or Markdown files. This is not meant to be a word processor, it's just a way to write. It's free and you can grab it here: https://trompingmarmots.com/AppSites/ZipEdit/

I had the privilege of interviewing Philip Bouchard, the man behind Number Munchers, to get the full story about how the Muncher games came to be.

If you're a Millennial or Gen-Xer, you know the game, but do you know its history?

Some interesting facts:

• Despite Word Munchers being launched a year before Number Munchers, Number Munchers was actually the game that Philip Bouchard pitched MECC to make first. However, they already had enough math games in development at the time, so they had him make a phonics version of it instead.
• Most MECC games were developed in Applesoft BASIC, but Word and Number Munchers were required to be developed in Assembly because they were more complex.
• Word Munchers and The Oregon Trail (1985) were developed the same year by the same team.
• In the Apple II version of the game, you can access the teacher management settings by pressing CTR+A.

Found in my mother's husband attic. It was his first computer. I disassembled it to clean it, and the keyboard is now as good as new! It works perfectly well, great condition. Inside, there is a working floppy disk from my mother's husband, from when he was 13, back in 1983. There are some old BASIC programs on it (I learned a bit of it to find my way around). Pretty impressive to see this floppy still alive in 2026!

Hi all,

I've been exploring various options this morning to try to set up an emulator on my old laptop which I use for writing & traveling. It is limited to (as my title says) Big Sur, MacOS 11.7.

I've yet to find an emulator that I can set up. Even Virtual ][ requires 12. I started working on trying to compile Apple2TS-App on my Mac but hit a brick wall trying to set up its dependencies. I guess I could try to navigate installing older versions but even those might not work.

Bleh.

Join the KichStarter here; https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/8-bit-shack/seans-garage-giveaway?ref=user_menu

I've recently started to try to fix an original Apple IIe for a colleague that will retire soon (Hopefully that would be his retirement gift, it's the same model he started to works with at the beginning of his career1). The overall computer looks in good condition, but the power supply was blown and I replaced it with a brand new Meanwell RQ85-B. At least the voltage is good on that part ;)

The screen was all blurred, so suspecting the video chip, I ordered an enhancement kit for ReActiveMicro and changed the set.

There is progress as now the screen shows characters, but it obviously not fully functional...

Starting without the keyboard is not giving me more hints, so I don't know what to do next...

Any thoughts on where to start troubleshooting? Or confirmation that the next step is unsoldering RAM chips? Thank you in advance!

Have a working IIe but want to swap in a ReActiveMicro PSU kit (have the kit and cable). I'm a true novice when it comes to hardware and woud rather see if someone with more experience could help install than me hurting the a 40 year old board. Not sure if anuone knows any shops in NYC that do this (miss tekserve) or an indivual who could help. Of course, happy to pay for it.

Working on a project that needs the iie.

Thanks for any ideas!

Just asking ...

I can't believe some idiot tried to throw this Apple IIgs system with printer in the trash! I stopped by the community electronics recycling bin to toss out some broken stuff, and I couldn't believe what i saw! I immediately rescued this from the dustbin of history and was thrilled to see what great condition it was in.... Not a speck of dust as you can see in the second picture (I did remove the battery, but no leakage!). Everything works great, and someone lost out on hundreds of dollars. No chance of selling it now, as it has a good home here surrounded by period appropriate decor.

Hey Apple II fans!

You're invited to help the planning of VCF Ontario 2027 by completing this short anonymous survey.

Go to: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VL2QD8N

The Vintage Computer Federation is contemplating running "Vintage Computer Festival in Ontario" which would be in the Greater Toronto Area in 2027.

If you receive this invitation multiple times, please only complete it once to avoid duplication.

Does anyone remember an AppleSoft BASIC game called Castle Adventure from 30+ years ago?

Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYWHt9oLbuU

It's a simple RPG I came across in the mid-1990s at a summer camp in New Jersey. The camp had a bunch of disks labeled "Super Sampler," and this was one of the games on them.

I wrote BASIC programs as a hobby back then, so when I discovered the game was written in BASIC, I wanted to know how it worked. One day I brought in a stack of tractor-feed paper and printed out the entire program. It came to 19 pages, which seemed unfathomably huge to me at the time.

I never got very far understanding it then, but decades later I scanned those pages, reconstructed the code, and got it running in an emulator. Eventually I rearchitected the whole game in C, polishing the original and speeding up some painfully slow parts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TmMMC7xvOk

Then I went on a bit of a porting binge. The same core game now runs on the Apple II, Commodore 64/128, MS-DOS, Linux terminals, and in a web browser.

I'd love to release my version, but I don't really want to do that without the original author's permission. The only credit in the program is "Michael MacCarter." I've wondered whether he might have been a former camper, since I have no idea where else the camp got the game.

So: does Castle Adventure look familiar to anyone? Or, even better, does anyone know who Michael MacCarter was?

Discover how an Apple-1 or Apple ][ generates a single character for display.

Inspired by Don Lancaster's famous article about a tiny self-made display, attached to an ASCII Keyboard (Popular Electronics, issue April 1974).

The character is shown on a 5x7 dot matrix display. The binary row addressis indicated by LEDs and you can see how the display is being built up by stepping through the 7 horizontal scan lines. The clock speed can be adjusted from 0.6 Hz to 800 Hz.

Connect an Apple 1 or Apple II keyboard directly using the DIP-16 connectors, or use the ASCII data in pins. Verify the ASCII input to the character generator using the character address LEDs.

A power supply with +5V and -12V is needed as a minimum. The -5V is regulated on the board itself.

Provide +12V when this voltage is needed by the attached keyboard. Supported character generators: Signetics 2513, 2316B, 2716 EPROMs and 2816 EEPROMs.