Emulating the Apple IIgs just for a quick play or two (on the PC)

[NewDeli]

Hi,


I could manage to make an ancient Apple IIgs emulator work under Windows Se7en, without manually changing screen resolution (which I hate to do).

MacOS users can benefit of running Sweet16, which seems just great, and there are very good IIe emulators for win32 OS's out there (AppleWin, still being dev.), but for the gs model, it's a bit hit and miss.

As I don't plan to install MacOS on top on my Dual Core (not yet) just because I am curious to see how two or three games look like on the IIgs, I was stuck with a dysfunctional XGS32 (wouldn't load any disk) or a dysfunctional KEGS32 (wouldn't emulate the keyboard properly).

So, I downloaded KEGS, which GUI is basic to say the least, but usable.

I could easily find a bootable v6 System "hardfile" (which is to be inserted in s7d1), the ROM file (which of course is legal to obtain), and a few .shk game disks, a format supported by the unarchiving utility CiderPress.

The System boots in 640x480 in a snap, provided the corresponding setting is ticked in the compatibility options of the icon, which fills the screen just fine (right click toggles speed up on the fly). I modified a few settings in the IIgs system itself, but as you can imagine, there's not much to do in there.

The two games I was mostly interested to see in action :

• The Lost Treasures of Infocom (the Zork series...)
• Silvern Castle

The funny coincidence is that the two EAB "Matts" had dealt separately with each of them .

A few months ago, Mad-Matt had made a preinstalled package of the Lost Treasures, which would run the games on the Amiga in the WHDload fashion. (Apple port keyboard is AZERTY, and I could not expect any 8-bit graphic ugliness : the two reasons why I decided to give it a try)

mattbarton.exe has recently made a [ Show youtube player ] of Wizardry, upon which Silvern Castle is based (looks pretty similar to me visually speaking, but wasn't coded in Pascal, and bears more items and monsters)


If you're curious about the short-lived edge the IIgs had by that time, I suggest you have a look at the fabulous [ Show youtube player ] port, or at Alien Mind which was a IIgs "exclue" (definition of exclue here ).


Obviously, this topic is open to anyone willing to speak about its gaming (or coding, or studying) experience with the Apple II, real or emulated .

[RedskullDC]

Hi Deleauvive,

Originally Posted by Delauvive

Hi,

As I don't plan to install MacOS on top on my Dual Core (not yet) just because I am curious to see how two or three games look like on the IIgs, I was stuck with a dysfunctional XGS32 (wouldn't load any disk) or a dysfunctional KEGS32 (wouldn't emulate the keyboard properly).

So, I downloaded KEGS, which GUI is basic to say the least, but usable.

Were you using the Kegs32 from :
http://www.geocities.com/akilgard/kegs32/
or the Kegs/SDL from:
http://devernay.free.fr/apple2/
?

What kind of problems were you having with the keyboard emulation?
Are you using Rom1 or Rom3?
I use Kegs32 this end on Win7x64 with no major problems..

Speed does have to be throttled to about 50MHz , otherwise mouse movements don't track correctly.
Mind you, once you go above about 18MHz, you are running faster than any real IIgs (with modded transwarp) on the planet
Source Code is in the Kegs32 archives (Visual C++ v6) if you feel like modifying it yourself.
Compiles ok with VS2005 after upgrading, had a few probs with VS2008 though due to quite a few deprecated bits and pieces.

I did tinker with the idea of adding a 1024x768 graphic mode at one point, reasonably easy since most of the generic ROM routines support a +/- 16384 drawing area. Even mouse routines have a max clip range of 1024x1024.
Only a few toolbox routines in QuickdrawII need to be replaced.
Could even use X86 native routines if done in the emulator.

...

I have a ROM3 machine here with a CF Adapter card for the HD, I think Kegs32 compares quite favourably. Kegs also has the added benefit of the 8MB ram maximum hack.
Can't think of any software that doesn't run off the top of my head.

Fair bit of activity on news:comp.sys.apple2 and assorted sub-groups if you weren't aware.

It's all fun anyway.

Cheers,
Red