The Great 1979 Upgrade

After checking just about every day for months to see if the incremental code changes getting logged were adding up to a full release, at last I saw the long-anticipated update to an emulator program that's caught my attention ever since it was first announced. The most interesting feature of "OpenEmulator" to me was how it emulated not just old Apple computers but also the cathode ray tube monitors they were connected to, but even when the original Apple II had been added I had the feeling there wasn't quite as much I could do with its absolutely unexpanded system as with other emulators. That's not to say there weren't ways to load certain old games into it, but even there I might still have been thinking a bit about the old dig "so what do you do with one of those things?"

Now, though, the Disk II, Steve Wozniak's last contribution to the computer the main circuit board of which he designed, has been added to the emulation, and I can start loading the disk images that can be dug out of odd corners online. From a more historical perspective, I suppose I'm contrasting what I've heard about the Apple II disk drives versus what I've heard about the TRS-80 disk drives, which seemed to have much more of a reputation for "flakiness" and some directory-eating bugs in the first releases of the official DOS that made running one or more of the several third-party operating systems de rigueur for the cognoscenti. At the same time, I know the emulator still isn't at "feature parity" with others, and there are some bugs being massaged out for the next release, to show up who knows when.