Loading Apple II games from your phone!

wottle

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Oct 30, 2021
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I never thought about using the "cassette" disk functionality of the Apple II to allow you to load games from your phone's audio jack. Might see if I have an old Android phone I can use expressly as a "disk drive" for my IIe.

youtube.com/watch?...

Everyone else might be familiar with this, but it was new to me and thought it would be cool to share.
 
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Drake

TinkerDifferent Board Vice-President 2023
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I never thought about using the "cassette" disk functionality of the Apple II to allow you to load games from your phone's audio jack. Might see if I have an old Android phone I can use expressly as a "disk drive" for my IIe.

youtube.com/watch?...

Everyone else might be familiar with this, but it was new to me and thought it would be cool to share.
I've done this with Tandy CoCo and TI-994a, sometimes it was finicky getting the volume just right but for the most part it was easy enough. A certain satisfaction too loading from tape :)
 
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wottle

Active Tinkerer
Oct 30, 2021
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Fort Mill, SC
I use this site for that: http://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/

I have streamed the audio from my mac mini, but I suppose it would work with any phone.
Yeah, I can confirm it works on a phone. I actually built a native iOS app that allows you to browse the asciiexpress games and disks. The advantages of this over the mobile web versions of asciiexpress.net are:

  • Easier browsing, I'll be adding a search / filter option
  • Game art (when available)
  • Automatic control of volume (making sure your device volume is set to max when playing disk audio)

And a future feature I'm hoping to be able to tackle - on device generation of the audio. So rather than having to stream the (relatively) large audio files from a remote server, I could, in theory, take the very small disk image, and convert it, realtime, into the audio needed for cassette input. Still trying to see if this will be possible, given my lack of knowledge of embedding C code into a Swift iOS app. Theoretically, this is possible, but the question is whether it's possible with my skillset / level of knowledge.

And, there's still the question of whether Apple would even allow an app like this in their App Store... More to come, hopefully.
 
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