Not much this time, but what’s there is important. Hardware hacker Ian Kim from Korea recently started selling his “Mockingboard 4C” add-on boards for the Apple IIc. This gives the IIc a real Mockingboard in slot 4, just like the slotted Apple IIs could have. There was a specific IIc Mockingboard made back in the day that hooked up through the serial port, but nearly no games supported it.

Anyhow, the code masters of French Touch passed along a request to me that they’d like to see support for it in MAME, as we’re the only A2 emulator that actually emulates the IIc as a IIc; the internal mouse and VBL mechanisms and stuff all work as much as possible like a IIc instead of a IIe. It turned out to be pretty easy the way the new driver had been architected, so now it works.

In lighter news, we’ve started to ingest all of the remarkable work of the hacker known as “4am” into the Apple II software list. This has involved replacing some popular games’ old crack-screen cracks with 4am’s new seamless work, which looks and acts exactly like the original game (a lot of old back-in-the-day cracks did not). Perhaps more importantly, a ton of previously unpreserved educational software is now included, and as everyone knows that software is one of the most important legacies of the Apple II.

We’re still hacking away on PC Transporter, too.