Retro Gaming Hacks

Emulate the Apple ][

Play old Apple games on modern hardware.

The old equipment is great, but it’s difficult to lug an Apple II (or even a //c) with you when you just want to play old Apple games on your laptop. Fortunately, you have lots of options. While I can’t find an Apple II emulator for a cell phone, there are emulators that run under both the Macintosh and Windows platforms and even Windows CE. The best list of emulators I’ve found is at http://dmoz.org/Computers/Emulators/Apple/Apple_II/ , but in practice I tend to stick with a very few emulators. You can also find an old but interesting Apple ][ Emulators Resource Guide FAQ at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/apple2/emulators-faq/part1/.

For all of the emulators, you’ll want to download some disk images before getting started. You can find lots of images at ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/. You’ll need to download the image (a .DSK file), and probably decompress it. Once you have a .DSK file, you can use it with most emulators. For convenience, I’m going to demonstrate emulators with ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/masters/dos33_with_adt.dsk, a dull but occasionally useful disk.

Warning

Many emulators require you to provide your own images of the ROMs from the Apple computer you’re emulating. You can create your own images from Apples you have around, though transferring them to a PC or Mac is inconvenient. There are downloadable ROMs available, but their legal status is uncertain.

Windows

On Windows, ...