DOUBLEDUMP 2.0

I would like to - belatedly - announce the release of my first shareware project: DOUBLEDUMP 2.0.

Well, make that very belatedly. It's actually almost 20 years late. And that's also why it's all in caps. DD2 (as I'll call it now) was my first ever 'published' program for the Apple //gs. It was used to visually compare 2 regions of memory.

What uses could that have you ask? Well, one of th eless nefarious ones was to find out how to create cheat-patches for games that involved 'lives' or other things stored in memory. The Apple's memory at that point wasn't very large (it came in 'banks' of 64k) so it wasn't too hard a task.

No, I don't expect you all to rush out and download the program, because, to be honest, the Apple //gs is a bit of a dead platform. Not many people (excluding my dad) will have one of them in the basement. In all fairness, the only reason I'm posting about this now is the fact that I only discovered that there was a copy of my program available on the internet. You have to understand that - although I gave an e-mail address in the 'about' section of the program - the Internet was not available to us mere mortals those days. One of the reasons I give for the shareware fee is "to enable me to send YOU (the ones who don't have regular access to a BBS or PD-library) my latest programs." (from the read-me file I wrote).

Yes, PD-libraries and BBSes. The glorious days of the modem. I don't know if you can imagine the sheer glee I felt on discovering this gem here. Here was something I had even forgotten the name of, let alone know of its existence on the internet. (It was only that I remembered the fact that I did make it and the pure luck of finding it by googling my name and 'shareware' that made me aware it was still alive).

I've got some images of the program working. I used the emulator KEGS32 and had to dig deep to remember the ways the Apple and ProDOS worked. But after not too much time it was back in all its glory:

The Intro screen

In action

Help!

The Plea

So there you have it. My teeth well broken on this first chunk, I went on to publish... nothing else sadly. So far this is the only self-published application of me on the Internet. Oh, I've helped create several internal or not-so-widely-spread application later on, but nothing on the scale of this little app. Yes, it's small, but it meant a lot to me.