Most of the times emulation is much faster and convenient. Running old software in emulation can be good and bad. If all this downloading is a bit much for you, the easiest way to explore Apple II software is via a browser applet/plug-in/activex widget at Virtual Apple ][. Flaws aside, once you get over the initial learning curve it can do a fairly good job with several IIgs programs, especially system software. The developers could learn a thing or two about usability from AppleWin. It is far from perfect and can’t run everything. The one that I have gotten familiar with is Kegs32 (a Geocities link… you’ve been warned) ActiveGS. However, if you are running Windows, you are a bit limited. There seem to be many choices if you are running OSX. AppleWin can’t emulate the IIgs so you will need to use another program.Įmulators for the IIgs are not nearly as good as AppleWin. There is also a great resource for IIgs called What Is the Apple IIgs? In addition to being a pretty complete history of the system, they also host disk images and packaging for most of the software ever released for the IIgs. There are several Apple emulators out there, but this one is the best. AppleWin is an Apple II emulator, a program that mimics the hardware of another computer in software. On a PC you can get these disk images running quite easily in AppleWin by just dragging the. Be warned, even though most of the companies that created this software are long gone, downloading old “Abandoned” software is still a legal gray area and there’s always a chance, albeit quite slim, that you may get in trouble for this. From here you can find just about every piece of software ever created for the Apple II in disk image format (usually a. The ultimate resource for all things Apple //e and earlier is Asimov FTP Archive. What’s great about playing around with a twenty year old computer is that all that software that looked so cool, expensive and unattainable back in the day is now widely available for download on the Internet. It’s fun to fire it up every now and again and listen to those 5.25″ drives grind away. I still own an Apple IIgs’the last of the Apple 2 computers before Apple went all Macintoshy and Apple’s direct competitor to the Commodore Amiga. In fact, I have posted a few of my better creations on this very web site (check out Dippy Golf and Malfunction). In the early eighties my dad bought a Apple ][+ and this is where I learned the ins and outs of programming. There was so much great software for the Apple 2 and I have many-a-fond memories of games like Karateka, Star Blazer and Ultima. If you regularly work with PDF files, ShrinkIt is a great utility to keep around to keep your PDFs slim without affecting their readability or image quality.I recently have been on a bit of an Apple II retro-computing kick. In fact, for some PDFs that include lots of bitmap content, the resulting file can actually be larger than the original-sometimes significantly so.) (The procedure works best on vector PDFs with lots of extraneous data, so ShrinkIt won’t provide significant file-size reduction for every PDF. In my testing, ShrinkIt was able to reduce the file size of PDFs containing a combination of text and images by as much as 35 percent, although I’ve seen reports of shrinkage of up to 95 percent for files that contain mostly vector images. The resulting batch of files was 25 percent smaller: 16.3MB compared to the original 21.7MB. You just drop one or more PDFs onto the ShrinkIt icon, or into the ShrinkIt window, and in a few seconds you’ll have smaller versions of those files, saved in the same location as the originals each original is renamed with org at the beginning of its name.Īs an example of ShrinkIt’s effectiveness, I dropped 13 InDesign-created PDFs-each of which was saved with InDesign’s extra options disabled, so the files should have already been as small as possible-onto ShrinkIt. The result is ShrinkIt, a simple, free utility that uses OS X’s PDF capabilities to quickly shrink PDF files.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |