With the exception of an original Apple iPad and an iPod Nano back in the day, I’ve never owned another Apple device. On the mobile side, I’ve always had Android devices from their first release, and from the computing side, I’ve always been in the PC camp.
But back in the time of the 8-bit computers, I don’t think I was even aware of Apple. Living in the UK, I was brought up with names such as Sinclair, Commodore, Acorn and Amstrad. But on the other side of the pond, Apples seemed to account for a vast number of people’s first home computers.
Well, I figured it was about time I found out what all the fuss was about and recently came across an Apple IIc up for sale. It had the Wdrive SD card floppy emulator with it, and I’ve also built up an RGBtoHDMI board for it and purchased a joystick port adapter to allow me to use PC gamepads with the computer.
I am currently running a Hard Drive image on the Wdrive named Total Replay, which has a large selection of the best Apple II games installed with a nice GUI to control it all. It even has a nice “attract” mode which scrolls through some of the games if you leave it sitting there doing nothing.
Going to spend some time now looking around the system and seeing how it all works. Getting used to such oddities as the Delete key not actually being a delete key and instead just printing a weird square character. Apparently, this is a real thing!
