Category: Geeks r Us
Hi! I've been playing with the Mess Apple emulator, running some of the old TexTalker games, BEX, and some of the other disk images that came with it. I haven't fired up an Apple 2 in probably 20 years, but playing with those old games sure made me appreciate what we have now, and Echo speech...Wow! How obnoxious! Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing what we had then. It was liberating to be able to do a project on my Apple, print it out on an ImageWriter, and hand it in with the rest of the class, but I'm sure thankful for what we have now. Has anyone else played with an emulator, or come in contact with a real Apple 2 recently?
20 years? Try more like 30? lol I'll never forget falling in love with my first computer, an Apple II E in 1987. I loved that monochrome green screen, horrid speech from the echo box, 2 disk Bex system, etc. Seriously, I absolutely loved that thing. We have definitely come a long way though. There were some games that I really liked too. I loved the space invaders.
Where'd you find this imulater?
I'm glad someone posted this topic.
now, keep in mind that my questions are coming from someone who's technologically spoiled, lol. my first computer experiences were with Windows 95. So I have next to no experience with command lines or anything of that nature.
So, having said that, can someone explain how you get this emulator to work? I read the help file, and tried to do exactly what it said to get a disk image to boot. However, it says something to the effect that I need to specify floppy disks. I do what it says to do at the command line. I type in the path to mess.exe, then, when it opens, I type in the command string that's supposed to get the games to run. I've tried the egames.dsk image. I am on a 32 bit Windows 7 machine.
obviously, with such a limited knowledge of how older computers worked, I'm missing something. If someone could point me in the direction of some tutorials about how this should work, I would be very grateful. I just want to see what the games were like, how the OS worked, and so on. it's just a matter of curiosity for me. I like old technology, and want to get a feel for what it was like. I kind of assumed that the emulation process would take care of having to know the language of the OS, a very naïve assumption on my part lol.
If you go to the www.applevis.com site, there is a podcast all about it. The podcast is Mac oriented, and I haven't tried it on the PC side of my computer, simply because it requires a full-sized keyboard to do some things like switching disks, and turning the 2E off. It does take a bit of working knowledge of the old Apple hardware, but when I figured out how to get the thing going, I was surprised at how my old knowledge came right back, even remembering the Echo commands to adjust the speech rate and pitch. As far as using BEX goes, I haven't figured out how to switch from the boot disk to the main disk yet, but it's so humorous to look at how primitive it all was compared to what we have now. Yet, BEX's editor, if one possessed the hardware, would still produce braille as good as what's out there today!
I have and I might get around to doing my first applevis podcast on it using the PC :)
It's awesome! memories!
It likes to freeze up on me on the Mac.
I'll have to check this out. I grew up too poor to afford one of these, though I was a teenager in 1985 when I did see one once or twice. Understandably, my parents saw IBM machines as the reasonable computers for the family since that is what business used, and so they got a Leading Edge in 1987 but I could not use it except by memorization of commands since I owned no talking software.
I just saw that Apple one summer in 1985 though and it was odd hearing that voice again. Lol then I didn't know how to use anything but a typewriter though I could change a mean ribbon then. lol lol
The voice is still odd! Listening back to it, it's hard to imagine once using it. Even words which should've been able to be pronounced correctly were always weird, and it kind of sung rather than talked.
I must say, I loved those things, when I was in school at m s b, they had them. and they had a hell of a lot of games for it. there is a file that I have that will automaticaly launch whatever game you want it to run on windows, for the mac, I haven't seen one of these files yet, but I do hope someone creates a launcher file for the mac because trying to remember the command lines for this sort of thing can rack my brain rather quickly. I remember too, when I was in public school, they had an apple 2 II e, however, one of the programs that I used on it, ifI remember, it was called, apple workd start up or something to that extent, and instead of sounding like it does now, it used smooth talker, the thing that the old dos program dr. spaitso used. those immage writer printers, shit, those things were the stuff back in the early 90's, was around those things for years too.
So it may emulate older hardware but you do need to make sure and run it on a dual core processor at least. Tried it on a older computer with hyperthreading and everything stuttered and stopped. Just a coffee break test but still. This was under Windows.
Not a complaint just an observation.
So curious, those commands for rate and pitch and review etc.? Where can I get those? the echocrick.dsk learning disk doesn't work though I have gotten others to.
Well I got it to load it's echocric no k at the end.
Pretty simple. Let me see if I remember. All echo commands start by pressing Control-E. You set the pitch by typing CTRL-E24p. To get it to speak flatly, change the P to an F. To get it to speak fast, CTRL-EC. To get it to spell, CTRL-EL. To go back to words, W. There are commands for Echo line review as well, but I don't remember 3 quarters of how to work that feature.
Forgot to mention, the pitch value is from 1 to 63, with 24 being the default.
I kind of miss the physical case itself, and that nice clicky keyboard. The Echo was fun to play with. The one I had in elementary school had some crazy flaw that would make it start talking in a really high voice whenever the word "bathroom" was typed.
Oooh! I loved the 2E keyboard, but I really loved the 2GS keyboard! In fact, when I got my first Mac, I noticed the old white plastic keyboards had a very similar feel to that GS keyboard. The newer keyboards do not, which is sad.
Remember the old appletalk magazine that came out a few times a year? Those were an excelent source for games. I never did care for textalker3.1.3, I always stuck to 1.3.
I loved 3.1.3 because if I remember right, that's the one that came out with any key silences the voice. Version 1.3's command structure was a bit different, too! Anyone remember the Echo Commander from APH?
Also making other disks talk was so easy, just add the textalker files, load hello and put in this line of code. 1 print chr$(4)"bruntextalker.ram" Then save the hello program and boot up the newly modified disk.
Yep! The hardest thing to get used to again was the cursor functions...Instead of using delete or backspace, you used the arrows and overwrote things. To insert required a command.
There were so many games for dos 3.3, not so much prodos, as that was more for word processing and other utility stuff. I've been trying to find the wheel of fortune game that was released for the 2e, and it did have textalker on it.
It actually comes with that emulator!
I've actually tried this morning to get that up and running on my macbook pro, and tried typing that in using the applevis podcast, typed it in as it went along, which took a lot of doing sense I had to pause the thing, type, etc., but never could get the disks to load. Is there someone here who can help?
I had no idea you had to type in such a huge string of commands just to get the thing up and running.