Neil Parker's Apple II page

I've been a fan of the Apple II (that's Apple's other computer, from before the Macintosh days, that they're trying very hard to pretend never existed) since my family got its first Apple II Plus (with a whole 48K of memory and one floppy drive) back in December 1981. That original computer is long gone now, but I still have an Apple IIGS on my desk, and I still enjoy using it.

Here are a few Apple-II-related things I've written.

• Hardware Info:

  • 5.25-inch disk hardware programming info
  • IIGS 3.5-inch disk hardware programming info
  • IIGS battery RAM hardware programming info
  • Inside the ADB Microcontroller
  • The 6502 Instruction Set Decoded

• Firmware/Software Info:

  • Some undocumented tidbits of the IIGS Smartport firmware
  • IIGS Memory Manager handle structure...Michael Guitton (sorry, no link) has provided ORCA/C source code that illustrates one way of accessing the handle structures
  • Applesoft hi-res graphics entry points
  • S. H. Lam Revisited: The problem with a common Applesoft programming trick, and how to fix it
  • Undocumented Secrets of the Apple IIGS System Loader
  • Undocumented Secrets of Apple Pascal

• Internet stuff:

  • The Apple II FTP/WWW site list (plain text version) is currently offline-- it hadn't been maintained in a while, and was WAY out of date.

• Miscellaneous technical articles:

  • How to calculate a CRC in 6502 machine language
  • Adventures with Kaleidoscope, the tale of how I wasted far too much time on a piece of trivial fluff
  • Multiplying and Dividing on the 6502
  • Multiplying and Dividing in Decimal Mode on the 6502
  • Addons for Applesoft, using & and USR--includes Input Anything and Computed GOTO
  • Fixing APPEND in DOS 3.3
  • Speeding Up Loads in DOS 3.3

• Software (mine):

  • Sanitizer: INIT to clean up after programs that fail to shut down SANE. For Apple IIGS with System 4.0 or greater.
  • Some external commands for ProDOS/BASIC.SYSTEM
  • Memory Info NDA: NDA to report memory usage stats and consolidate free memory. For Apple IIGS.
  • Better BOOT13: Boots 13-sector disks, including some that Apple's BOOT13 and BASICS won't
  • AMPERFONT: Display IIGS fonts on any Apple II in Applesoft
  • DLOWRES: Draw double low-resolution graphics in Applesoft
  • MSWSRAND: A new random number generator for Applesoft, based on Widynski's Middle-Square Weyl Sequence

  There's also software attached to Inside the ADB Microcontroller, S. H. Lam Revisited, Undocumented Secrets of the Apple IIGS System Loader, Undocumented Secrets of Apple Pascal, Adventures with Kaleidoscope, Addons for Applesoft, Fixing APPEND in DOS 3.3, and Speeding Up Loads in DOS 3.3.

• Software (other people's):

  • lisa40g.shk: LISA816 4.0g assembler by Randy Hyde and Brian Fitzgerald. Assembles 6502, 65C02, and 65C816 code, and can output IIGS load files. Requires 128K Apple IIe/c/GS with ProDOS. LISA816 4.0 users will probably also want:

    • ANIX22.SHK: Shell commands for the ANIX 2.2 shell

  • lisa51a35.shk: LISA 5.1a assembler by Randy Hyde and Brian Fitzgerald. Requires Apple IIGS with GS/OS.