THE BUS FILES! (February 2017)

I think it was Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe Software who popularised in Apple II circles, or at least gruesomely sold, the urgent concept of sharing your decaying Apple II materials to the internet before you get hit by a bus.

My progress on Wade Memoir has been gradual, so I've decided to do just that; collect all the remaining stuff I made on the Apple II when I was a kid or teen and put it online right here on this page, for starters. The result is two main zip archives of Apple II disk images: The Bus Files and The Bus Files Music. Each archive includes a .txt file with a summary description of the contents of every disk image inside, but I've also put those text files on this page so you can see what's inside each archive without having to download it.

I'll continue to write up individual games and programs for this site over time. In the meantime, if the bus comes for me, refer to The Bus Files, which includes such programs as are demonstrated in the screenshots below:

The Bus Files consists mostly of my games — some file-based, some taking up whole disks — plus utilities and tests and demos, and movies I made for Fantavision, and Merlin source code any other odds and ends I made back in the day. There are a handful of images for the IIGS specifically and the rest (the vast majority) are for 8-bit Apple IIs. This includes most of what I consider to be the best games I made (e.g. Dragon) which I have yet to write about on Wade Memoir.

The Bus Files Music has just two images in it. One contains a 2mg image with all the tracks I made for The Music Studio on the IIGS and which can be played back using that software. The other is a .dsk image of songs I made for The Electric Duet on the 8-bit Apple II, which can be played with that software. I produce electronic music today as Aeriae, so a lot of my teen progress in this area is tracked on these disks. As well as all the original tracks, there are lots of covers of game music in here, too, from C64 games especially, as well as from Apple II games, and even from PC and Amiga games.

The Wade ActiveGS-Music Studio Pack includes the same Music Studio tracks disk as in The Bus Files Music, plus a copy of the Music Studio program itself. The pack makes it as easy as possible to get songs playing on a PC or pre-Catalina Mac via a preconfigured copy of the ActiveGS emulator. You just unzip the pack, doubleclick the contained app (if on Mac) or exe file (if on PC) and it will put both the program and music disks in the drives, set the computer speed correctly and boot up. Then you just have to load/play songs. Instructions included inside, as well as separately on this page.

Here are the zip archives and the info texts:

wade-the-bus-files.zip (1.9 MB)
wade-the-bus-files.txt

wade-the-bus-files-music.zip (400 kB)
wade-duet-music.txt
wade-music-studio-music.txt

MUSIC-STUDIO-PLAYBACK-INSTRUCTIONS.txt

Wade ActiveGS-Music Studio pack.zip (2 MB)