So although playing all those old games I used to love on something that more closely represents a real apple II than an emulator on a PC is indeed great fun, I quickly discover that not all my disks have survived the last 20 years in storage (although a surprising number do seem to have) and so decide to get back into my challenge.

It has indeed been an emotional day with great ups and and now downs...

The next part of my story begins with me pondering about how to get the Warp6 software onto my LCe - or more specifically, my pre-configured copy I have sitting on my emulator.

After a little thought, I thunk that this would be a piece of cake - simply "shrink" the appropriate files in my emulators disk image to a .shk, use ciderpress to extract it to a 1.44MB floppy, stick this in the LCe, copy the .SHK to the prodos partition, startup my LCe and unshinkt. I was already on a winner as a had a 800k Prodos floppy that had Prodos and Shirnkit on it - so could boot that straight into 8-bit shrinkit on the LCe. Smiling to myself I thought this was wrapped up - until... "Cannot open forked file". Forken hell!! So after some research it seems that transfering the .shk via the Mac somehow "forks" the file. I played around with a few things like binscii'ing the file, changing the file's type with "TYPECHANGE", trying to find and kill any resource fork with Resedit, but ultimately nothing worked. I dont think I exhausted all my options in trying to deal with the forked file, but this was quickly becoming the hard option, when I'm all about the easy option - so I started to think about another way (or plan B - because I still had my original 800k prodos disk with the Warp6 archive and door games shrunk up).

Basically two other options crossed my mind

1. All these involve building a cable between my LCe and my PC (which needs to be done at some point anyway). I'd then be able to either get online from the LCe and download the files (Which I'd have to upload somewhere), or connect to my emulated II on my PC via serial and download direct.

2. Use DiskCopy 4.2 on the LC to create a disk image of my 800k Prodos disk, copy this image to a 1.44MB floppy and then onto my PC to see if I could mount the image in an emulator.

I choose option 2 as I thought this would be quick to try, great if it worked and will allow me to move on without having to get my soldering iron out (just yet).

Creating the disk copy image was easy enough as was getting it back to my PC, and as luck (or the foresight and skill of the programmers - probably just luck tho ;-) ) would have it, KEGS will mount a DiskCopy 4.2 image. So using Shrinkit 3.3 I formated my 800k disk image and then shrunk up all the stuff I wanted onto the said image. Shutdown KEGS, copied the image file back to the 1.44MB floppy, and onto my LCe. At this point the file type and creator were all messed up, so a quick ResEdit and DiskCopy recognised the file as a disk image - here I struck a problem. DiskCopy 4.2 wouldnt read the image - it complained that the checksum was incorrect and told me the image was probably corrupt. Bugger. Deterred only slightly, I decided to see if I would have better luck with DiskCopy 6 (which I already had installed on the LC) - it too complained about a bad check sum, however, after a minute or so looking at the additional options in DiskCopy 6, I found an option called "convert disk image" (or similar) - which allows you to disable the checksum check. So, I said I wanted to convert the image to a DiskCopy 4.2 800K image, and mount it after saving and what do you know - the disk mounted, said it was a prodos disk and there were my .SHK files - copied them (using the finder) to my Prodos Hard drive partition on the LCe, booted into my IIe and shrinkit quite happily opened the .SHK's and extracted the files - in the words of Borat "Great Success". Unfortunately it didnt last.

So now that I had my configured warp6 BBS environment onto my LCe - why not fire it up I thought - why not indeed - well, how about perhaps because Warp6 does some kind of check to see if its running on an enhanced IIe and guess what - the LCe fails the test!!!! ARGHHHH!! So Warp6 tells me it "cant detect vertical blanking". I know nothing of what it talks and so google it and from the results speculate that its some kind of video thing. Can it be that the emulated video that is handled by the Macintosh with quick draw doesnt emulate some kind of parameter that Warp6 is checking for?

So now I am depressed and will ponder my next step (which wont be disassembling the warp6 loader to disable the check - which I admit would be cool, but is not quite in my league). :(

Perhaps another beer with my feet in the paddling pool as the sun starts to get low in the sky (but is still hot)... yes that sounds just right.