[Blindapple] an introduction

Thu Sep 28 18:25:25 EDT 2017

I should add that Eamon Deluxe works fine on my Windows 10 64 bit – for a sighted user. It just will not talk in the Dos Box environment. So if you could get it to talk…..

Running a virtual machine is the only alternative, I guess.

From: BlindApple [mailto:blindapple-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of JM Casey
Sent: September 28, 2017 5:54 PM
To: 'Blind Apple Discussions'
Subject: Re: [Blindapple] an introduction

Have to grin a little at the thought of Eamon being “modern and relevant”. But sure, I know what you mean. I guess though that the reason the port was done in qbasic is that it’s *relatively* similar to applesoft and so the amount of work that needed to be done was somewhat minimised. He did quite a lot of those adventures. With over 200 to choose from, that’d be a pretty big project to undertake.

I found a programme that is supposed to be a quickbasic interpreter for 64 bit systems. Still haven’t tested it for accessibility though. And I guess it’s not likely to work with the Eamon Deluxe front-end.

So what happens when you try switching disks with the Apple emulator?

From: BlindApple [mailto:blindapple-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of Erik Burggraaf
Sent: September 28, 2017 5:47 PM
To: Blind Apple Discussions
Subject: Re: [Blindapple] an introduction

Eamondeluxe does not work on any 64-bit windows. It worked just fine on a Mac, at least up to OS 10.9. Unfortunately, the speaking feature for the blind did not work on a Mac. I tried several times to contact the developer about this, but never got a response. I think a mobile Port would be more modern and relevant anyway. Anyhow, it would be nice to play the games again one way or the other.

On September 28, 2017 5:31:15 PM "JM Casey" <crystallogic at ca.inter.net> wrote:

Hey Eric.

Yes, I haven’t played with the emulator enough to verify that the method of switching disks works. Some people on the audiogames forum seem to have got it going, though. All my eamon apple images here are in 800 .po image format, which I was just told will not work on the 2 E emulator. But there is a big archive of .dsk images at the Eamon Guild site, I think. I’ll be looking for that later myself.

Getting off topic for this list, but if you don’t have Win 10 64, I recommend the Eamon Deluxe port for PC very much. It works great if you can get qbasic going. The newest version, 5.0, comes with Dos Box, but as yet I haven’t figured out how to get that to work with a screen-reader (it might require a hardware synthesizer, I guess, too). But I’m still investigating this. When I contacted the developer around 2011 he was very forthcoming and helpful, but it looks like he hasn’t worked on the project since 2014, so I’m not sure he wants to be contacted about this any longer.

Did you ever play these games on the Apple? I had maybe around a dozen adventures, and I played all of them, even the two or so that had bugs in them that caused them to break to basic prompt either before or during play. I found out there were over 200 adventures, and by that time I was on PC/Msdos and couldn’t play them. I was a little upset about that! Haha

From: BlindApple [mailto:blindapple-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of Erik Burggraaf
Sent: September 28, 2017 5:17 PM
To: Blind Apple Discussions
Subject: Re: [Blindapple] an introduction

This is supposed to be the case, but it never did work for me. The only Adventure I was ever able to play was the beginners cave. I am pretty sure I managed to get the disc swapping process right eventually. It just never worked.

I have some vague plans to author a mobile version of demon in my programming degree, but that may be a couple of years off.

On September 28, 2017 4:57:47 PM "JM Casey" <crystallogic at ca.inter.net> wrote:

Weird. For some reason I did not get Jeff’s message, but only your reply to it, Eric.

Perhaps someone will correct me on this, but I think so long as you have textalker loaded on the master disk, you don’t need to do anything special with other eamon disk images, as you don’t generally boot from them at all. I think there is an archive of Eamon apple disk images; we could probably just use those. I’m probably going to try, anyway, since I cannot get Eamon Deluxe to work on my Windows 10 PC. A shame: it worked fine on XP, but Windows 10/64 throws a fit if you try to run a 16-bit application, hence no Quickbasic.

From: BlindApple [mailto:blindapple-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of Erik Burggraaf
Sent: September 28, 2017 4:42 PM
To: Blind Apple Discussions
Subject: Re: [Blindapple] an introduction

Has anybody put together a full set of talking Eamon discs yet? Thanks, Eric

On September 28, 2017 4:04:03 PM "Jeff Weiss" <jeff-weiss at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Jayson has set up the

Talking Apple Archive on dropbox—there are a  lot of 140K disk images there 

Which should work fine with the emulator.

Under periodicals, there are all twenty issues of Apple Talk, 8 issues of Baud, and 52 issues of Open Apple.

All of these are available  as 140K .dsk files.

Under Jeff Weiss, you will find several directories 

disk library, which has several categories of public domain disks,

Dos 3.3 which has games, courses, a word processor, and utilities disk that I used to sell,

and

Prodos which has Prodos versions of these games, courses, and a utilities disk that I used to sell.

All should work with the emulator.

Jeff Weiss

From: JM Casey <mailto:crystallogic at ca.inter.net>  

Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2017 11:27 AM

To: 'Blind Apple Discussions' <mailto:blindapple at bluegrasspals.com>  

Subject: Re: [Blindapple] an introduction

Hey jeff. Thanks for responding.

I never used a 3.5-inch disk drive on my 2 E (was that even possible?). – Will the 800k Prodos images work on the emulated extended 2 E? I ask because the emulator hangs the system every time I try to boot one using the command: mess apple2ee –flop1 whatever.po”. Or at least, it has done so far. I think there might be some background process that’s messing up mess (hah) somehow, and I can try and figure out what it is. But I realise I’m maybe not even clear on the capabilities of the extended E. This is more than just a 2 E with 128k of ram, right? That’s the system I used to have, with the 80 column/memory expansion card. Do I have to in some way tell the emulator that –flop1 is a different sort of disk drive?

Sorry if the questions seem to have obvious answers; I’m pretty much a newcomer to emulation and although I find it fascinating I’m not 100% sure I understand how it all works.

From: BlindApple [mailto:blindapple-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Weiss
Sent: September 28, 2017 10:47 AM
To: Blind Apple Discussions
Subject: Re: [Blindapple] an introduction

Welcome to the list.

I don’t know about Windows 10 as I still use Windows 7, but maybe one of the other list members can help with that.

Jeff Weiss

From: JM Casey <mailto:crystallogic at ca.inter.net>  

Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 5:00 PM

To: 'Blind Apple Discussions' <mailto:blindapple at bluegrasspals.com>  

Subject: [Blindapple] an introduction

Hello everyone. I’m new.

I used to use an Apple II E in the late 80s and early 90s. I was pretty young then. I’ve been a PC guy for a long time now, but someone recently sent me the Mess emulator and Apple II-E Extended rom along with a lot of disk images, and I found the address for this list in the archive. It’s really neat that people are doing this. So far I’ve had success in getting Apple + Echo emulation a few times, but the emulator is just as likely, it seems, to hang my Windows 10 machine. Well, at least it works at all. I must say, hearing that Echo voice again after so many years is uncanny. I forgot how much that guy sounds like he’s singing, especially in extended speech mode.

I always wanted to learn properly how to programme in Applesoft Basic back in the day. I picked up a few tricks, mostly from looking at other programmes. It’s all coming back to me now. Weird, and cool.

Anyone have any tips on getting the emulator to work consistently? I haven’t yet figured out the pattern of the hanging. So far I haven’t gotten a single prodos disk image to work, but I don’t know if there’s something I’m missing or what? Is the command line for running the prodos disk images the same? To be perfectly honest, I mostly just want to play the Eamon games. The port for PC is nice but it won’t work on Windows 10, to my knowledge. 

Please excuse this rambling message. I’m just feeling a real nostalgic wash about all this at the moment. Cheers.

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