Virtual Apple II – Apple II and Apple IIgs games ready to play in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Virtual Apple II – Apple II and Apple IIgs games ready to play in the browser

virtualapple.org

86 pointsempressplay22 comments

Not in my browser: "ActiveGS only works on Windows or Mac!"

Likewise, I was hoping to get in a game of Thexder. What is this "ActiveGS," and can it be trusted?

Does this work better? https://archive.org/details/a2gs_Thexder_1987_Sierra The Archive also has DOS and Tandy versions, maybe others.

For extra realism, consider incorporating Trevor Blackwell's analogtv.c source code. It's a faithful DSP simulation of late 1970s television circuitry. You can see it in action in some Xscreensaver modules.

AppleWin is an Apple II emulator for Windows which is cycle accurate. Recently, they added a better TV mode using Sheldon Simm's code.

https://github.com/AppleWin/AppleWin

http://wsxyz.net/applewin.html

You can run AppleWin on Mac and Linux using Wine.

It seems to be a Java thing. Probably wasm and emscripten (1) would be fast enough nowadays but this emulator was created many years ago.

(1) They can't access the sceeen AFAIK so we still need some plain JavaScript to interface the emulator at every computed frame. Is there any project like that, not necessarily retro computing?

Just plain javascript is fast enough: https://porkrind.org/a2

The ActiveGS Chrome extension required to run the games on this site is broken, and the code hasn't been updated in two years:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/activegs/nhndampaj...

It shows the sad state of the web: anything you build will automatically be broken in a couple of years.

I downvoted this because it is nonsense. And in this case it is broken because this site depends on a browser extension. A native browser extension.

The web is one of the great stories of backwards compatibility along with Microsoft's herculean efforts on DOS/Windows over the years.

>The web is one of the great stories of backwards compatibility

Are you serious? Flash is being dropped eventually, npapi plugins (especially wrt Java) are out, the blink tag is gone, Firefox extensions are being dropped for a worse system, breaking changes to JavaScript, the list goes on.

On the other hand, HTML I wrote by hand in some terrible Windows text editor in 1997 still renders fine. It's kind of a mixed bag.

There's another native JS emulator with lots of disk images built-in: https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/#asteroid

consider also "a lot (1010 as I type) of Apple 2 games cracked again, with a documentation on how it's done" https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am&tab=about

Another great collection of old browser-ready software from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary

Sadly, there's one small time-slice of games that the Internet Archive Software Library doesn't cover: games for Windows 95/98 that were 16-bit code, but also used 32-bit Windows APIs. Slightly too old for modern Windows to support; slightly too new for DOSBox to manage to run. :/

Some of these are sold on GOG, but the rest have faded into the kind of complete availability-oblivion that the IA is supposed to prevent—they're not available as torrents, you can't find them on eBay, etc.

Examples? There isn't a whole lot from that era that I haven't found SOMEwhere.

It wants to install a browser plugin? Haha, no thanks.

seriously. This is not "in browser" if you need a plugin in my opinion.

See here for more Apple II stuff: ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/site_index.txt

Awesome, they have Taxman and Super Taxman, I can play the maze I drew up again!

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