I created a new logo for the main page of this site: www.dribin.org. It was made with The Print Shop. The real Apple ][ one. On my Mac. How? Emulation. I used an Apple ][ emulator called Virtual ][ (WARNING: that link plays some really obnoxious music!). Aside from the music that plays on the site (did I mention it was obnoxious), it’s an awesome emulator. Sound and video work nearly flawlessly, so you can play all the old games. It even has cool disk noises, so it sounds like a real Apple ][ disk drive. I don’t know if the noises are somehow linked to disk drive commands, but it certainly sounds more than just random disk noises. It sounds just like I remember. Then, to top it all if, it emulates a dot matrix printer. And anything you “print”, can be saved as a PDF.

So, to create the logo, I ran The Print Shop in Virtual ][, and “printed” it out to a PDF. I then converted the PDF to a PNG, using Apple’s Preview. And, finally, I created an HTML image map using The Gimp. It’s worth pointing out the detail in the original PDF. If you zoom in (or print it out on a laser printer), you’ll notice that there are nice horizontal line artifacts to make it look like it came off a real dot matrix printer. Here’s a close up:

logo_zoom.png

That’s just a nice detail. It is a commercial app, but it’s by far the best Apple ][ emulator I’ve used on any platform. So for me, it was worth the price. Now, I must get back to my game of Montezuma’s Revenge.