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Filed under: Apple, iPhone

Apple yanks Commodore 64 emulator for BASIC interpreter easter egg


Manomio has certainly been patient in waiting for their fully licensed, retro-awesome Commodore 64 app to be allowed beyond the velvet rope guarding the entrance App Store.

One of the hold ups that led to their initial rejection back in June was the presence of a BASIC interpreter. Rather than strip the code entirely, Manomio tucked it behind a Konami code of sorts. Once users began reporting their luck in re-enabling the interpreter, Apple unceremoniously booted the emulator out the back door.

According to Manomio, the code has now been totally removed and the application re-re-submitted to Apple for re-re-approval.

It seems like an odd point of contention. As PC Mag's Jamie Lendino puts it, "anyone who would try and crash the iPhone via programming the C-64 emulator in BASIC deserves a gold star more than anything else, but that's my opinion."

Filed under: Design, Macintosh, Apple, Mods

BootXChanger lets you change your Mac's boot logo

BootXChangerAs someone who has used Windows as my primary operating system for years, I got very comfortable with modding various parts of the user interface. One of the things that was most fun to change is the startup image - my favorite was a very official looking FBI splash screen that made it look like you were logging onto a government computer.

Since switching to the Mac platform, I've been surprised at the relative dearth of modding options for the operating system. Thankfully, Steven Sande over at our sister site TUAW recently posted about BootXChanger, which allows you to change the monochromatic Apple logo that you see when booting into OS X to something different. While it's not an entire boot screen, it is enough to give your machine a bit of personality.

It turns out that creating images for use on the boot screen is very finicky, but BootXChanger comes with a set of fifteen sample images to get you started. Right away I was torn between using the radioactive symbol, or the classic Commodore 64 logo. The radioactive symbol won for now, but given the ease of switching boot logos, I can imagine I'll be swapping between the various options or maybe even taking a shot at making my own soon enough.

[via TUAW]

Filed under: Features, Blogging

Which early personal computer personifies the candidates?

It's Super Tuesday here in the US, the day when a large swath of Americans cast their ballot in the Presidential primary. Try as we might, we couldn't decide who to vote for. So, we thought we'd lay things out with a metaphor we could easily understand; classic computing. After analyzing candidate after candidate, we think we've figured out which goes with what, so without further ado we answer the unasked question, "Which early personal computer personifies the candidates?"

Barack Obama



The Lisa. Predecessor to The Macintosh, and every Mac which came thereafter, the Lisa was a powerhouse in its day. It was also obscenely expensive, new, and "inexperienced". The Macintosh spent the 80's and 90's as "that other PC" and has only recently come into its own and displayed the ability to lead the pack.

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Filed under: Fun, Games, Open Source

Commodore 64 emulator in Flash

FC64It's one thing to clone a video game in Flash; it's something else entirely to write an entire emulator for an entire game console, and I don't think it's done until now: Darron Schall and Claus Wahlers have released FC64, a Commodore 64 emulator implemented in Flash. For now FC64 is alpha-quality and very much a work in progress, but if you have Flash Player 9 beta installed you can play a live demo of Matrix, a homebrew C64 game by Llamasoft. Darron Schall has some more information about the project on his blog, and the full source code for you ActionScript jockeys is available at the FC64 web site.

[Via Waxy.org]

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