Rebuilding James Bond's Apple IIc – A Software Forgery [video] | Hacker News Reader

Rebuilding James Bond's Apple IIc – A Software Forgery [video]

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As someone who coveted the Apple //c in high school, I absolutely loved this.

Does anyone remember Beagle Bros software?

I worked a second job in 1984 to score an Apple //c! I still have it safely tucked away in storage and had an opportunity to fire it up a couple of years ago. It worked perfectly.

Beagle Bros...oh yes. I so loved their software. Those guys had such a cool, retro aesthetic and the code was so much fun. Like Monty Python, but for BASIC. Such great times. I wanted a Mac so bad though, but there was no way to afford that, even with two jobs.

Programming my //c in assembly led me 3 years later to my first programming job (I was a staff artist at a Children's book publisher) -- programming the Mac in 68K assembler! So I ended up with a Mac anyway, if only at work.

The //c was such a sweet little machine!

Slightly jealous of your //c.

I probably owe Beagle Bros most of the credit for nurturing my lifelong interest in computers. (My father gets the rest for giving me the things in the first place!) How many hours I spent poring through those charts and books of peeks and pokes and two-liners. I want a way to recreate that magic for the youth of today.

I had //e. The only thing I coveted more than a //c was a Laser 128EX/2. (OK and maybe a IIGS and a Mac…)

Me too! They single-handedly got me interested in "making a computer do stuff" with those charts of peeks and pokes! Here I am ~35 years later and I'm still making computers do stuff.

Well I started on a TRS-80 but quickly became obsessed when I got my hands on a II plus and then an IIe. I never got to use a //c but remember a friend got one. It was as close to portable as you could get then and I remember wanting one really badly.

The Beagle Bros "Big Tip Book for the Apple II Series" was the only programming text I had in 1989, and no internet yet nor did I know anyone who knew about programming as I was 10 years old. That was my favorite book as I thought it was hilarious and I learned Basic from it and a bit of assembly. Changed the direction of my life for sure.

I love stories like this..ones that hit you as a child that completely change the direction of your life.

Their floppy disk care icons were hilarious: https://thisisagoodsign.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/beagle-bros...

Speaking of floppy's I remember the brand to get for the Apple machines at that time was Elephant. Because "an elephant never forgets".

I remember Beagle Brothers tip sheets. I had a program disk "Silicon Salad" from them. I remember a couple programs.

One was a "pop corn texts" where the letters would explode up to form a title page.

The other would spin disk a, then spin disk b , faster and faster like a train... I feared for the drives (it was my moms work computer), but it was fun. (We had a //e with the double drives)

I guess some have tried to interview the guys behind that company, but they're not talking .

You can remember them every day, if you like!

https://www.vintagetechstickers.com

The movie 2010 had another cool //c appearance—in that case Dr Heywood Floyd was shown using the //c with an LCD display at the beach. It seemed so futuristic back then. I don't think I ever took a laptop to the beach at any point in the real calendar year 2010, but I did do so in 1995 and that scene from the movie was on my mind the whole time.

That actually checks out, after a fashion - in full sunlight you could just about make out the image on one of those old LCDs consistently. That said, https://madeapple.com/apple-iic-flat-panel-display/ suggests it didn't mount securely enough for any kind of portable use, or fold down for transport. Good product placement, though.

I've never taken a laptop to a beach in my life. I'd worry about it ending up full of sand, although my cameras have so far managed not to, so maybe that's not such a huge risk. In any case, nothing worth doing at a beach seems likely to involve a keyboard.

Haha yes there's also a laptop-on-the-beach scene in The Net!

Works great on a IIe, as well!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/49838052551/in/album...

I had particularly strong memories of that movie and that Apple //c scene. I was compelled to share some of them in a blog post about Max’s achievement. What an effort he put in!

https://bytecellar.com/2020/04/29/apple-c-scene-from-80s-bon...

The code and disk image are up on GitHub for anyone who wants to run it themselves: https://github.com/MaxPiantoni/View-To-A-Kill

That’s cool! But it’s clear he did not find the right font. What puzzles me when I look at the map screen from the movie is that there are two point sizes being used. “San Francisco” and “Palo Alto” use crisp lettering with 5 pixel tall lowercase characters, while the rest of the labels are slightly larger with more clumsy and distorted shapes. Maybe they scaled them up a little with simple nearest neighbor scaling?

A 5-pixel x-height suggests the IIc's native font. I think the other labels might have been drawn pixelwise, because you're right, they're sized wrong and the letterforms are weird, e.g. the 'm' in 'Fremont', the 'a's in 'Hayward' - I think they're stretched 1 pixel in each dimension, but it doesn't look nearest-neighbor to me so much as hand-fitting to size.

Perhaps they wanted to scale up all the labels to read better on screen, but found hand-drawing the upscaled versions to be unexpectedly time-consuming and decided to stop with a couple of them still drawn in the native font.

Hi I'm Max, this is my project. As you say the text sizes on the Map screen are inconsistent in the movie. I did wonder if this could be to do with image/lens distortion, either from the camera or the glass on the CRT.

I considered drawing them out pixel by pixel to match the movie exactly but in the end I just settled for erasing the cap on the J in San Jose, so it would match the movie more closely.

I'd love to know how they actually did it.

Per his request after watching to leave a comment - imho it Is a great work. Some might say it is a total waste of time but what is a waste to one, is a entertainment with great value to others. Bringing a small picture around and draw it for 10 years is really a waste one may say. But to one it is trying to re-create a beauty of a woman called Mona Lisa. Cheers!

I did a similar map on a Z80 machine running CP/M. I used the MS ROM BASIC that came with it. It had a PLOT command. First I would use BASIC to print the city names on the screen, then PLOT the dots representing the coastline. All in it's amber on black glory.

Amber monochrome was the "ergonomic choice" for working late back in the day. Decades later to be rediscovered with f.lux, redshift, et al.

This is amazing. I love the passion and dedication in projects like this. It is so easy to take a few seconds of film like that for granted, but this is a great reminder of how much work goes into the details.

The OP presentation is absolutely delightful. The challenge of (reverse) engineering to a visual spec, the presentation of programming with severely constrained resources, old school hardware, retro, egalitarian programming language--so many fun parts about this project.

And all of it comes out of, as you say, "a few seconds of film".

1) this is an incredible effort

2) not to be “that guy” but technically it’s Stacey Sutton’s Apple ][c. As a kid I was shocked that she had a personal computer in the mid 80s. Underrated film in my opinion!

I never saw the film as a kid, but if I had, I'd have been super excited to see that Stacey Sutton had the same computer I did!

My grandfather, an old-school mechanical engineer, didn't know the first thing about computers or electronics - but he saw the possibility of something new and significant on the horizon, and when by chance at an early age I showed that I might have a propensity for this strange new kind of machine, he saw to it I'd have the opportunity to develop whatever talent in that line I might have.

I'm currently in the sixteenth year of an undistinguished but nonetheless solid career in software engineering, so that seems to have worked out well for the both of us. I could only wish he'd lived to see and take joy in the result, but I don't doubt that, wherever he is, he's smiling.

I'm fairly certain it's //c to ][c

//c or not ][c, that is the question.

Actually, IIe or IIc. That is the question.

https://flic.kr/p/4BRrSj

For (2), they say that at about 00:19 ("Stacy one of the main characters has one of these computers" according to the autogen CC). But would you have clicked the link if the title was "Rebuilding Stacey Sutton's Apple IIc"? I wouldn't have meant anything to me.

Of course, you're right. To be honest I clicked because I was confused as to when James Bond himself used a IIc - only film from the era that I remembered him using a computer was in the opening of License to Kill, and I was fairly certain was an IBM PC. What I got was a pleasant surprise!

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