The missing Apple II version of M.U.L.E.
I occasionally wonder why I haven’t seen an Apple II version of M.U.L.E. so I decided to search for it. (The short answer is that there isn’t a version of M.U.L.E. on Apple II because the creators said that it wouldn’t be possible.)
I really don’t know anything about playing games on an Apple II, I don’t think I even saw one before the 90s. But that just makes me more curious about it. What, for instance, made it so expensive? Where did you buy them? (In Sweden in the 80s I mostly bought C64 stuff in phone stores, later at game stores). What did people use them for? Did doing that make them happy?
While I was working on the assembler for my C64 game (x65) I started out with source code for a bunch of effects I had written in a variety of existing assemblers, like KickAssembler, TASS and DASM. The goal was to make it seamless to assemble all my old code with a single assembler, but as I added features it seemed natural to look for more assemblers to support.
Apple II has a large number of assemblers each with its own syntax, and probably too many to list. ORCA/M and Merlin seem to be common and Merlin in particular has a unique syntax (from my perspective). Learning about the various assemblers led to trying to understand the hardware better and my conclusion is that it seems harder to make games on Apple II than other computers at the time.
There is a lot more to read about Apple II hardware on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series
Prior to creating M.U.L.E. Danielle Bunten and Ozark Softscape created a number of games and other software for Apple II, with many design cues that can be seen in M.U.L.E.
A game that is primarily white and black and a small number of colors (often green, purple, blue and orangish) makes me feel there would have been an Apple II version in some form. Electronic Arts, the publisher, released a significant number of games on Apple II, and Seven cities of Gold, a later Ozark Softscape game, was released on Apple II.
But the whole reason for thinking about Apple II at all is could I, hypothetically, port my C64 game to Apple II?
The fairly obvious answer is that no, I can’t or at least I wouldn’t.
Why? I don’t have the passion for the hardware in the same way as I do for the C64 and it would be half adzed at best. Also I’m using 64KB of RAM and Apple II has between 4 to 48 KB of RAM. Using fast enough disk loading might make a port possible. That being said, I am open to the game somehow making it to Apple II in some way at some point even if I don’t know how.
The primary blocker to me is the lack of hardware timed interrupts, and drawing to the screen efficiently. Apple IIgs is probably more capable and farther than I’ve researched, although I do support the non-accelerated version of the IIgs OS object file loader in my assembler.
In spite of my observations there are obviously a lot of great games for Apple II. There are all the adventure games sampled by Leigh Alexander some of which I played on the C64, and other games enjoyed by friends who owned Apple IIs. I even got some optimization support for PS3 (Playstation All-Stars) from John Brooks who created Rastan for Apple IIgs.
In my search for the answer to the non-existence of the Apple II version of M.U.L.E. this is the first result for “apple II game mule”: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/228992-mule-for-the-apple-is-it-impossible/
The first post mentions an article (CGW, 12/84, p.40) which is scanned in at the CGW Museum.
And here is an excerpt from that magazine where Dan Bunten (later Danielle) claims M.U.L.E. can’t be done for an Apple and explains the Portage of games and how to deal with it as a gamer and as a reviewer:
It is interesting how at the time you reduced colors and features to fit on an Apple or an IBM, and the C64 version was the full featured or only version developers would target. But the conclusion is that M.U.L.E. is not missing from Apple II, the creators of the game simply felt it was not capable of running the game the way it was intended.
And clearly several versions of M.U.L.E. were well received and are still enjoyed, such as the Atari version.
Happily, for my own game, I feel the C64 still holds up, and I still have a few KB of RAM to spare for sound! Progress is ongoing…