Beagle Bros and Wonderful disk drive noises

[shoppa@alph02.triumf.ca (Tim Shoppa)]

In article <4q6ftg$d62@access1.digex.net>,
R. D. Davis <rdd@access1.digex.net> wrote:
>>	...and that cool little "chugga chugga" program in the Beagle
>>Bros. catalogs. =^)
>
>What are Beagle Bros. catalogs?

Beagle Bros. was a Apple II software company run out of San Diego.
Their software was truly amazing - a mix of machine language and
Applesoft BASIC that made the best use of *both* to make some
really neat games that you could LIST and modify and play around
with.  Unlike most of the software of the time, it wasn't copy
protected at all, and even included comments in the code to suggest
modifications you might want to make.

Their catalogs were just as fun.  In the index of the catalog there
would be an entry for "Free Money" on page n+1, where n was the
number of pages in the catalog.  The whole thing was filled with
"two-liners", two-line Applesoft programs which you could type in
and run.  Almost invariably the two-liners were filled with peeks
and pokes to the graphics mode hardware addresses and other hardware
ports to get your Apple II to do things that no-one, not even Woz,
would have believed them to be capable of.

In particular, there was one particular program called "Magic Pack"
on their "Beagle Bag" disk which had two amazing options:

1.  "Card Scanner" would direct you to hold a playing card up to a
specified area on the CRT screen, then when it told you type "RUN"
and you pressed <Return> it would scan the card and tell you what
it was.  It was 100% accurate - every time I typed in the "RUN"
command, it always correctly reported the correct rank and suit
of card being held up (i.e. "Ace of Spades", "3 of Hearts", etc.).

2.  "Plenty Questions" would ask you to think of an item, and then it
would ask a series of questions like the
usual "20 Questions" game, to which you typed in answers.  Amazingly,
whenever I was typing in responses, it could *always* get the correct
answer, no matter what you were thinking of.

If anybody doubts the ability of a Apple II to do either of the above
tasks, I invite them to come visit me in Burnaby, BC, and I will
demonstrate, provided you take me out for a nice meal afterwards.

Tim "Control-A" Shoppa. 

 Tim Shoppa, TRIUMF theory group          |  Internet: shoppa@triumf.ca
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