A week or so ago, I signed up for the Winter RetroChallenge Warmup in the hopes that setting a goal by participating would spur me into action, and it has… Sort of. I picked “an Apple III programming project” for my challenge and I’ve gotten as far as settling on Pascal as the development platform. But here’s where I’m stuck. I’m not the most creative person when it comes to dreaming up cool things to do with my retro-toys and as such, I have no idea what I should write. As I don’t know much about Pascal, and I’m down to about two weeks to submit something, it will have to be simple and relatively easy to put together.
There are already graphics and productivity packages and even a few games for the Apple III. Maybe something with sound? A simple music player to take advantage of the III’s improved audio capabilities might be fun. Whatever I decide to do, I need to get started. Time is growing short…
In his “Pascal programming for the Apple”, TG Lewis has an example of a notes player in case you need help Mike.
Other ideas:
- File manager (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal)
- Simple HTML interpreter
- Credit card numbers verifier (I’m trying to think of something that wasn’t as common in these days as it is today with these last two)
Good luck Mike!
Olivier.
Create a QR code generator. You can use a block cursor or LORES to do it quick. Then you’ll have a way to one-way network the /// to the real world. You can then write programs on the /// that can create output your iPhone can read, interpret and execute on. E.g. you could put every Apple retro site in your code and then write an Apple site of the day program that displays a random QR to your iPhone camera and voila! Your reading it.
It’s on my list of things to do when I have time. But it’s yours if you want it.
Thanks, Egan. Sounds like a neat idea, but that’s way, way, way above my meager coding skills. I appreciate the offer, but I would never be able to produce a working product. Can’t wait to see yours, though!
All great ideas, Olivier! There will be no Winter Warmup entry from me this year, though. As a tweet from the guy over at RetroChallenge pointed out, I’ve already wasted over two weeks without even an idea let alone any progress, so I threw in the towel.
…and i still shed tears!
Oh, don’t give up! At a min how about a blog posting of how to do Hello World on the Apple /// with Pascal. That way you may help another get started quicker on the ///.
Don’t worry, I’m not giving up entirely and “Hello World” is certainly a good idea for a starter project, but it’s not something for RetroChallenge. Perhaps I’ll find some time tonight to play around. If I do, you’ll see the results here.
The QR code generator is a nice idea. Over the holidays, when I was home with my childhood Apple ][+, having no luck getting ADTpro to talk to it, I got so far as to research what how the QR codes are generated, with the idea being that maybe I could send disk images out the video port by generating patterns that I record and then translate back on a modern computer. It quickly became clear that it was be too big of a project for the time available (what I did finish was basically just something that read the sectors from the disk and print them on the screen in hex), but once the idea occurred to me, it surprised me a little that such a thing hadn’t been made. The bandwidth is probably sort of low, but I like the “wirelessness” of it. Maybe I’ll try again someday.