Blast to the Past

My first computer was an Apple IIGS that we got back around 1988. I was about 8 years old or so. The GS stood for Graphics and Sound. It had a color monitor and everything. And I’m talking a real monitor, not a TV that you hooked up to it. I remember a lot of people would connect their TV’s to their computers back then. Nowadays you have to buy a special card for that. My IIGS came with two disc drives…a 5.25 inch floppy and a 3.5 inch floppy. Those were the days. The cool games were on the 3.5 inch discs. Dark Castle was probably my favorite. I never did beat the last level on it, but I still loved playing it. I also remember Wheel of Fortune and that cheesy music it had with it, and The Oregon Trail. Those were on the 5.25 inch floppies so of course the graphics were inferior to Dark Castle. :)

For the longest time I had wanted to play Dark Castle, but short of plugging in the old IIGS I never had much luck on finding it back on the great expanse called the Internet. I had found a few emulators that you could download and load the disc images but the ones I had played with were a hassle. A couple of years ago I found a really nifty little website called virtualapple.org that has a ton of Apple II and Apple IIGS disc images that you can play on their website. It’s free, and there is a location to make a donation if you would like to. Every game I could think of was on there, plus a few I had forgotten about. Zany Golf, The Bards Tale, Mean 18, Choplifter…you name it. They even have the “Your Tour of the Apple IIGS” disc that would help you learn to use the mouse and keyboard…beginners stuff but fun and mindless. I LOVE this website. Despite the kick-tushy graphics they have nowadays, it’s still fun to go back to the old days and play those games I grew up on.