This collection called "4am Collection" within aims to preserve and expand in the future, a wide range of software for Apple II in original format.
As a result, we have them all in a correctly ordered and identified collection, where we can see details of when they were published and even an option to download them via torrent. This group called 4am, is a group of anonymous hackers that has managed to break the copy protection scheme in more than 500 programs and games of the already considered classic, Apple II. The good thing about all this is that it does not require any installation on our Mac or computer, we can simply play streaming directly without the need for anything else. Well, the website, thanks to a compilation uploaded by 4am, offers us the possibility of playing hundreds of timeless titles such as those named as well as many others who squandered imagination and above all creativity. If you have access to either, I am certain they would appreciate it if you would use it.Surely more than one of you is a true nostalgic and although this time caught him even a little far away, you will have played a game to the mythical Force and Motion, Stargate, Simon Says, Paperboy, Impossible Mission 2, Sneakers, Pacman, Donkey Kong, Frogger. They prefer AFS or Gopher as first choices.
As a good citizen of the web, let me note that UMich prefers you to access the archive with a browser only as the course of last resort, since this makes use of the university’s general web server.
I will post on this separately, but simply finding it at UMich, after failing to turn up such a capability anywhere else, demonstrates the point that there are many unique and hard to find titles at this archive.
In my case, I found another item that I have been looking for FOREVER – a good load meter for Mac OS. Trolling this list can be very enlightening and will almost certainly lead you to all sorts of new things.
00index.txt contains a brief, few line description of each program in the folder, sorted by filename. Each folder has an index file called 00index.txt, which provides reasonable details on each file in the folder. In many cases a program’s filename may not be enough for you to guess what it does, and to decide whether you might want to try it or not. Doing this may not be as easy as it could be unfortunately, due to the above mentioned FTP style interface, which shows only the program’s filename. You will find lots of other wonderful programs at the UMich archive as well, many of which are not featured at the more commonly searched sites. In my case, I did in fact find the program I was looking for at the UMich archive, where I must have picked it up originally. If you know the program’s filename, you can easily scan the lists of titles and see if it is there. You can see this clearly in the screen shot below:ĭespite this limitation, it is a VERY rich source of Macintosh “abandonware”, and I want to draw your attention to it, for those of you who may be looking for that hard to find program. It is MASSIVE, but it has the drawback of using an old style FTP GUI, which makes it less “friendly” to work with than many of the others. I was sure that I had gotten the program at the excellent Macintosh Garden site ( ), or perhaps the Macintosh Orchard ( ), or maybe even at Pure Mac ( ), but my efforts to find it at any of these sites proved fruitless.There are more than a few places on the web where one can find collections of Mac OS Classic software, and so I started hunting around – I had to have gotten this program from somewhere!Įventually I arrived at one site that I had nearly forgotten, but which should have been at the top of my list: the University of Michigan software archive. While researching an upcoming post for this blog, I had reason to track down the original source of a program that the post will feature.