My parents owned and operated a small computer store in the mid-80s, Yukon Software. I didn’t get to bring a lot of software home from the store, but one program I ended up with was Trivia Fever. I’ve posted this picture before. That’s me in the mid-80s, wearing a Miami Vice knock-off jacket with a Footloose-esque spike hairdo. That’s my original Commodore 64 I’m posing with, the one I still have and use today. Right behind my Commodore computer is a blue box that reads Trivia Fever. Trivial Pursuit debuted in 1979 and, according to Wikipedia, peaked in 1984. By… (read more)

Well… not “new” new. While it’s no secret I’m a Commodore fanboy, I do like to give credit where credit is due. Although pretty much across the board the Commodore 64 versions of games looked better than their Apple II counterparts, there was one thing I was always jealous of — the Apple II’s second fire button. While Commodore opted to use the standard Atari 2600 DB9 joystick port, Apple went with an analog format that supported two fire buttons. Both designs have advantages and disadvantages, but there were several games that took advantage of that second button on the… (read more)

Back in December I wrote a blog post about trying to make one working Apple IIe out of four parts machines. The project hit a snag when none of the parts machines I had acquired had drive controller cards. For the past three months I’ve had a table out in my garage that looks like this: While digging around in a “junk drawer” upstairs over the weekend, I found the missing piece: a drive controller. That’s kind of how I work; a project that’s been dormant for months will suddenly leap to life. It’s the offspring of too many projects… (read more)