Short Programs

Select a Project Link below to view each project’s details, including the program code. You can either copy and paste these programs into your favorite Apple II emulator or enter them into your actual Apple II by hand, then type RUN to execute the program.

Programs with the badge will run perfectly fine on a 1MHz Apple II, but may take minutes or hours to execute. For these programs, I strongly recommend using an emulator at full speed or an accelerated Apple II.

• Feeling Industrious

  

  

  Isometric industrial complex

• Fifteen Puzzle

  

  

  Sliding tile puzzle

• Concentration

  

  

  Card matching game

• Sierpinski Triangle

  

  

  Draws the fabled fabulous fractal

• Identity Crisis

  

  

  Susan Kare's "Happy Mac" on an Apple II

• Truchet Tiles

  

  

  Crazy mazy looking thing-a-ma-bob

• Junk Drawer

  

  

  Draw things with chunky pixels

• SYS.DIAG

  

  

  System diagnostic (not really)

• Mind The Gaps

  

  

  2019 Two-Liner Contest winner

• GR-Kanoid

  

  

  2019 Two-Liner Contest submission

• Target Practice

  

  

  Artillery game

• Geometric

  

  

  Geometric pattern

• Tower of Hanoi

  

  

  Interactive puzzle game

• Tessellator

  

  

  Tessellated patterns

• Sprite

  

  

  Draws Kirby on the screen

• Typing Game

  

  

  Type letters and get a high score

• Desert Island

  

  

  Text adventure game

• Hello

  

  

  Handy Applesoft program loader

• Snake Game

  

  

  Interactive snake game

• Floyd-Steinberg Plasma

  

  

  F-S dithered sine waves

• Color Plasma

  

  

  F-S dithered perspective landscape

• Random Plasma

  

  

  Random dithered sine waves

• Fireworks

  

  

  Animated fireworks display

• FizzBuzz

  

  

  I AM SO SMART! S-M-R-T!

• Gumballs

  

  

  Draws 260 gumballs on the screen

• City Scape

  

  

  Randomly generates a city skyline

• Driving

  

  

  Driving game with obstacles

• Stacker

  

  

  Simple stacking game

Download The Disk Image

The following image contains the above programs in a single, easy-to-use package.

• short-programs.dsk
  

Tips & Tricks

If you’re interested in writing your own one- and two-liners, I’ve compiled some tips & tricks that you might find helpful.

My Other Apple II Projects

Game Boy Tetris for Apple II

I released an Apple II port of the Game Boy version of Tetris in late 2023. You can download the playable disk image and source code from one of the following locations.

• MediaFire
• Apple Asimov
• Internet Archive
  detailed instructions in comments

Conway II

A pretty fast implementation of Conway’s Game of Life cellular automaton on the Apple II.

• GitHub Project

Community

Thank you for being one of the like fourteen people who really digs this retro stuff. If you have any problems with the programs in this repo, please let me know by creating an issue. I’m also aware that my one- and two-liners are very hacky and difficult to parse out. If there’s a particular program you’d like to understand better, but you’ve hit a roadblock, let me know and I’ll try to make time to add detailed dev notes.