AppleWin
AppleWin (also known as Apple //e Emulator for Windows) is an open source software emulator for running Apple II programs in Microsoft Windows. AppleWin was originally written by Mike O'Brien in 1994; O'Brien himself announced an early version of the emulator in April 1995 just before the release of Windows 95. Development of AppleWin passed to Oliver Schmidt and is now maintained by Tom Charlesworth. AppleWin originally required a minimum Intel 486 CPU and is written in C++. AppleWin has support for most programs that could run either on the Apple II+ or the Apple IIe. By default, AppleWin emulates the Extended Keyboard IIe (better known as the Platinum IIe) with built-in 80-column text support, 128 kilobytes of RAM, two 5ΒΌ-inch floppy disk drives, a joystick, a serial card and 65C02 CPU. AppleWin supports lo-res, hi-res, and double hi-res graphics modes and can emulate both color and monochrome Apple II monitors; later versions of AppleWin also can emulate a television set used ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mike O'Brien (game Developer)
Mike O'Brien is the former president and co-founder of ArenaNet and executive producer of its games ''Guild Wars'' and ''Guild Wars 2''. He led the design and content creation teams of the original ''Guild Wars''. Before co-founding ArenaNet, he worked as a company director and a lead programmer at Blizzard Entertainment where he developed the 3D rendering engine of ''Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos'' and led the development of ''Battle.net''. He also worked on ''Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness'', ''Diablo (video game), Diablo'' and ''StarCraft'', where he, among other things, designed and created the MPQ (file format), MPQ archives used in all Blizzard games after Diablo. Mike O'Brien was featured as one of the most influential people in the video game industry on ''PC Gamer's'' September 1999 cover story ''"Game Gods"''. O'Brien also previously developed an Apple II emulator for Windows, AppleWin, and old DOS ASCII game, ''Pyro 2''. In early October 2019, through the official Guil ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Paddle (game Controller)
A paddle is a game controller with a round ''wheel'' and one or more ''fire buttons'', where the wheel is typically used to control movement of the player object along one axis of the video screen. A paddle controller rotates through a fixed arc (usually about 330 degrees); it has a stop at each end. Design The paddle wheel is usually mechanically coupled to a potentiometer, so as to generate an output voltage level varying with the wheel's angle relative to a fixed reference position. A paddle is thus an absolute position controller. That is, without any previous knowledge, the sensor can be read and the result directly indicates the position of the paddle knob. This is in contrast to a rotary encoder-based device or "spinner". Where employed Paddles first appeared in video arcade games with Atari Inc.'s ''Pong'' in 1972, while the first console to use paddles was Magnavox's Odyssey that same year. The Apple II shipped with paddles until 1980. The Atari 2600 used paddles for ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Windows Emulation Software
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for servers, and Windows IoT for embedded systems. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. The first version of Windows was released on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Windows is the most popular desktop operating system in the world, with 75% market share , according to StatCounter. However, Windows is not the most used operating system when including both mobile and desktop OSes, due to Android's massive growth. , the most recent version of Windows is Windows 11 for consumer PCs and tablets, Windows 11 Enterprise for corporations, and Windows Server 2022 for servers. Genealogy By marketing ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Apple DOS
Apple DOS is the family of disk operating systems for the Apple II series of microcomputers from late 1978 through early 1983. It was superseded by ProDOS in 1983. Apple DOS has three major releases: DOS 3.1, DOS 3.2, and DOS 3.3; each one of these three releases was followed by a second, minor "bug-fix" release, but only in the case of Apple DOS 3.2 did that minor release receive its own version number, Apple DOS 3.2.1. The best-known and most-used version is Apple DOS 3.3 in the 1980 and 1983 releases. Prior to the release of Apple DOS 3.1, Apple users had to rely on audio cassette tapes for data storage and retrieval. Version history When Apple Computer introduced the Apple II in April 1977, the new computer had no disk drive or disk operating system (DOS). Although Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak designed the Disk II controller late that year, and believed that he could have written a DOS, his co-founder Steve Jobs decided to outsource the task. The company considered using ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Apple ProDOS
ProDOS is the name of two similar operating systems for the Apple II series of personal computers. The original ProDOS, renamed ProDOS 8 in version 1.2, is the last official operating system usable by all 8-bit Apple II series computers, and was distributed from 1983 to 1993. The other, ProDOS 16, was a stop-gap solution for the 16-bit Apple II that was replaced by GS/OS within two years. ProDOS was marketed by Apple as meaning Professional Disk Operating System, and became the most popular operating system for the Apple II series of computers 10 months after its release in January 1983. Background ProDOS was released to address shortcomings in the earlier Apple operating system (called simply DOS), which was beginning to show its age. Apple DOS only has built-in support for 5.25" floppy disks and requires patches to use peripheral devices such as hard disk drives and non-Disk-II floppy disk drives, including 3.5" floppy drives. ProDOS adds a standard method of accessing R ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Save State
A saved game (also called a game save, savegame, savefile, save point, or simply save) is a piece of digitally stored information about the progress of a player in a video game. From the earliest games in the 1970s onward, game platform hardware and memory improved, which led to bigger and more complex computer games, which, in turn, tended to take more and more time to play them from start to finish. This naturally led to the need to store in some way the progress, and how to handle the case where the player received a " game over". More modern games with a heavier emphasis on storytelling are designed to allow the player many choices that impact the story in a profound way later on, and some game designers do not want to allow more than one save game so that the experience will always be "fresh". Game designers allow players to prevent the loss of progress in the game (as might happen after a game over). Games designed this way encourage players to 'try things out', and on r ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hard Disk Drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box. Introduced by IBM in 1956, HDDs were the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers, though personal computing devices produced in large volume, like cell phones and tablets, rely on ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sound Card
A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term ''sound card'' is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications. Sound functionality can also be integrated onto the motherboard, using components similar to those found on plug-in cards. The integrated sound system is often still referred to as a ''sound card''. Sound processing hardware is also present on modern video cards with HDMI to output sound along with the video using that connector; previously they used a S/PDIF connection to the motherboard or sound card. Typical uses of sound cards or sound card functionality include providing the audio component for multimedia applications such as music composition, editing video or audio, presentation, education and entertainment (games) and video projection. Sound cards are also used for computer-base ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Phasor (sound Synthesizer)
Phasor is a stereo music, sound and speech synthesizer created by Applied Engineering for the Apple II family of computers. Consisting of a sound card and a set of related software, the Phasor system was designed to be compatible with most software written for other contemporary Apple II cards, including the Sweet Micro Systems Mockingboard, ALF's Apple Music Synthesizer, Echo+ In audio signal processing and acoustics, an echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound. The delay is directly proportional to the distance of the reflecting surface from the source and the lis ... and Applied Engineering's earlier card Super Music Synthesizer. References ;NotesPhasor Manual External linksApplied Engineering 1986 Summer/Fall Catalog. Phasor appears on page 12 [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mockingboard
The Mockingboard (a pun on "Mockingbird") is a sound card for the Apple II series of microcomputers built by Sweet Micro Systems, which improve on the Apple II's limited sound capabilities. In 1981, Sweet Micro Systems began designing products not only for creating music, but speech and general sound effects as well, culminating in the release of the Mockingboard in 1983. The Mockingboard's hardware allowed programmers to create complex, high-quality sound without need for constant CPU attention. The Mockingboard could be connected to the Apple's built-in speaker or to external speakers. However, as the quality of the built-in speaker was not high, the instruction manual recommended obtaining external speakers. The Mockingboard was available in various models for either the slot-based Apple II / Apple II Plus / Apple IIe systems or in one special model for the Apple IIc. Sound was generated through one or more AY-3-8910 or compatible sound chips, with one chip offering three s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ethernet
Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3. Ethernet has since been refined to support higher bit rates, a greater number of nodes, and longer link distances, but retains much backward compatibility. Over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET. The original 10BASE5 Ethernet uses coaxial cable as a shared medium, while the newer Ethernet variants use twisted pair and fiber optic links in conjunction with switches. Over the course of its history, Ethernet data transfer rates have been increased from the original to the latest , with rates up to under development. The Ethernet standards include several wiring and signaling variants of the OSI physical layer. Systems communicating over Ethernet ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |