Monthly Archives: March 2015

The Software Factory – AstroApple (Tape Distribution)

This archive contains a disk image (13 sector DOS 3.2 format) of the tape distribution of AstroApple, an astrology program by Bob Male, distributed by The Software Factory. The other side of the disk has the diskette distribution, but there were so many bad sectors that the FC5025 couldn’t image it.

Get the archive here.

Someone posted a scan of the manual here (free to view in your browser; downloading apparently requires free registration).

astroapple-manual

The Software Factory – BABBLE (Tape and Diskette Distribution)

This archive contains the 13-sector DOS 3.2 disk images for the tape and diskette distributions of BABBLE. What’s BABBLE? An ad in Softalk describes it this way:

“Have fun with this unique software. You write a story, entering it as a BABBLE program. As you write the story you specify certain words to be selected by the computer or entered from the keyboard at execution time. Run the program and watch BABBLE convert your story into an often hilarious collection of incongruities. The ways in which BABBLE can entertain you are limited only to your imagination. You can compose an impressive political speech or write poetry. You can plan a dinner menu. You can even form images on the screen or compose musical tunes with the help of BABBLE. The cassette version requires at least 16K of RAM and the diskette version requires at least 32K of RAM. BABBLE is written in machine language and runs on any Apple II computer.”

Get the archive here.

babble

Software Factory Dealer Demo

This is a 13-sector DOS 3.2 format disk image for The Software Factory Dealer Demo diskette, containing brief program demonstrations for Beneath Apple Manor, AstroApple (48K version), and Babble. The main menu is dated August 25, 1979.

Get the disk here.

I’m fairly certain some file corruption happened in the FC5025 transfer, even though my notes don’t indicate that any errors were encountered:

astroerror

babbleerror

Source code and distribution images for Don Worth’s Beneath Apple Manor

Of all disk images made from Don Worth’s original floppies, I imagine these will be most popular.  This archive contains disk images for various versions of Don Worth’s seminal “Beneath Apple Manor”, a proto-Roguelike (BAM was published two years before Rogue) for the Apple II.

Don Worth's original "Beneath Apple Manor" diskettes.

Don’s original “Beneath Apple Manor” diskettes.

BAM DISK DISTRIBUTION PD1 3.2

This floppy contains the disk and tape distributions of the first version of Beneath Apple Manor, published in 1978 through Don’s company, The Software Factory.  Side 1 is the floppy version (which I believe is identical to the images already floating around the Apple II content aggregation sites).  Side 2 is the less-commonly-seen cassette version. DOS 3.2 13 sector images.

BAM SPECIAL EDITION PS 3.3

This is the source code for the Special Edition of Beneath Apple Manor, an enhanced version of the original.  BAM:SE was published in 1982 by Quality Software and features high-resolution graphics and improved gameplay. DOS 3.3 images.

NOTE: The FC5025 reported an error on side 1 during the imaging process and the file “CORRIDOR” is corrupt.

damaged

BAMSE MOCKUP

This is the distribution diskette for the Special Edition sold by Quality Software and is not copy protected.

BAMSE 6/3/83 PROTECTED MASTER COPY 2 of 2

Unsurprisingly, the copy protection prevented me getting a good image of this diskette. It’s the same as the “Mockup” diskette, with the additional DRM code.

Get the .zip archive here.

Source code for Don Worth’s Zap, FixCat and Linker

This archive contains disk images of Don Worth’s Zap, Fixcat and Linker.  Zap is a sector editor loaded with great features. FixCat is a tool designed to repair damaged disk CATALOGs. Both programs are part of “Bag of Tricks”. I included the Linker image with this archive because, as Don explains:

Zap and FixCat source files were set up to run through my Linker program. So there were a lot of little source files that hooked together on both sides of the source diskette.

Don also gives us a little background on Linker:

I was a systems programmer at UCLA and was used to doing development with an assembler and a linkage editor. We had source code in small pieces – each “module” was an independent subroutine with its source stored in a separate text file. When we wanted to change something, all we had to do was edit one little file and reassemble it, the run it through the linkage editor which would combine it with all the other previously assembled modules to create the final product. This is similar in concept to a “build” in more modern terms. Some of my programs on the Apple were pretty large, and I didn’t want to be always having to reassemble the whole thing just to make tiny changes. And, I wanted to be able to reuse subroutines (such as disk and file access) in more than one program. That’s why I wrote Linker.

You would set up a jump table in your code for all the subroutines you wanted linked to your program, and put a special binary code there so Linker could find it in your assembled binary file. Then you would store all the binary files on a diskette with their file names matching the names of the subroutines. You ran Linker and put in the top-most calling program (your main program) and Linker would find the jump table and start looking on the disk for the subroutine binaries. As it found them it assembled a bigger jump table, combining all their calls as well, and resolving the addresses in the resulting conglomerate of modules recursively. If you needed to, you could switch diskettes (or flip one over) to access more binary subroutine files until you had all of them included. It was an automated process. When you were done, you could bsave the memory locations where the resulting “build” had been created for a runnable binary.

I was always more proud of Linker than Zap or any of my other programs.

Here’s the .zip archive.