Things keep pouring in that I need to clean up, set up, test, and document, but the day job continues to require most of my attention. I did manage to scan a couple of manuals, I’m not sure if they are already out there scanned somewhere, but here are mine. These are the first two programs I bought for the Apple II.
Both are early Apple II titles, one is The Graphics Magician by Penguin Software, and the other is The Voice by MUSE. Both are things I played around with quite a bit early on in my programming life.
The Voice (asimov image, recently converted to copyable DOS 3.3 format by Hot Rod) is basically the program that was used to make the guards talk in Castle Wolfenstein (“Kommen Sie!”). It allowed you to record your own words, tweak them, and then use them within your own programs. This was what enabled me to record my 12-year-old opinions on livestock in the program I recently unearthed that produced the following: (Unfortunately, the conversion vimeo did cut off the end of the sound, but I do have the unconverted version as well.)
The Graphics Magician was a similar (and really rather more sophisticated) toolkit for producing graphics within your own programs, by providing a library of machine language routines that could be called from within Applesoft BASIC (or assembly language). (There are several images in the asimov graphics directory, I haven’t checked them to see what distinguishes them.) I played with this a lot, but I have to do some more archaeology to discover most of my creations. Here is one, though, a demo of a “game” (from a collection I wrote under the name of “The Rather Pointless Software Company”) entitled “Dodge the Weights.” (For quite a while my “alias” on BBSes was “Grimalkin”—I liked the kind of sound of it and the association with cats [due to my affinity for my Apple-Cat II modem] as well as with kind of witchcrafty stuff. I chose to ignore the fact that it’s also generally a female cat.)
Anyway, here are scanned and auto-OCRed versions of the manuals. The Graphics Magician came with a main manual and a separate programming tutorial, both are linked below. The version of The Graphics Magician that these manuals pertain to, it seems, is 5.82 (May 1982).
