Reviving the Apple IIe for the open day [loc-003N]

  • March 22, 2026

On the 28th of March (the same day as our choir concert), we have the ANU open day. I'll be there in the morning, showcasing some of my retro computer collection. I decided to write a 140KB program for my Apple IIe (just enough to fit on one floppy image) that prospective students can use to learn about our degree programmes.

This was about 1000 lines of assembly: the entire thing is actually graphics, I don't use the Apple II text mode at all. It's actually quite impressive that the Apple IIe is fast enough to do this kind of bitmap rendering. But it truly is a bizarre system: the addressing for the bitmap data is super weird (all over the place), and each byte of bitmap data is 7 (not 8) pixels of data. Still, it means you can do some impressive graphics considering when the first Apple II came out.

It also has a screensaver to stop the burn in on my amber monochrome monitor (which has the right colours for ANU).