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The March 2011 issue in-depth

Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 2011)

As announced yesterday, the first issue of the sixteenth volume of Juiced.GS is now arriving in all subscriber’s mailboxes, having been mailed four days ago.

The most striking feature about this issue is the full-color cover. The past year has been good to Juiced.GS, and we’ve reinvested that fortune back into our print publication. The cover sports artwork by artist and Leadlight game designer Wade Clarke, who not only gave Gamebits permission to reprint his piece but who also did some custom revision for our purposes. The product of his effort also marks the first Juiced.GS cover to feature artwork, instead of a photograph or screenshot.

The story that goes with this cover is Ivan Drucker’s review of Leadlight, framed in the larger context of the potential and struggles faced by the interactive fiction genre. This in-depth piece represents Juiced.GS‘s first Apple Core feature.

Another first is Martin Haye’s introduction to the Apple II. Our retrocomputing community includes many enthusiasts who are dusting off their Apple II for the first time in decades, or even acquiring their first Apple II machine from eBay. Martin welcomes those new to the hobby or interested in joining by looking at likely places to get Apple II hardware and software, kicking off a three-piece series that will review everything one needs to know to get an Apple II up and running.

By contrast, this issue also includes the last installment in another series, that being what the Juiced.GS staff have familiarly been referring to as “the file transfer series”. Directed by Ewen Wannop, this five-part series has featured contributions from almost every one of our staff writers, describing ways to exchange files between an Apple II and a Mac, Windows, or UNIX machine, and what to do with the files once they’re there. This series has been literally years in the making; now that it’s done, we’re reviewing all the changes that have occurred in retrocomputing technology since we first outlined the series, so that we can start revising it for its next iteration.

Finally, occasional contributor Peter Neubauer returns to our pages with an exclusive interview with Alan Floeter, creator of Macrosoft and The Assembler. Look for exclusive bonus content from this profile tomorrow on the Juiced.GS blog.

My Home Page, DumplinGS, Random Numbers, and a full-page, full-color advertisement for KansasFest round out this issue’s twenty pages. These stories are indexed in our exhaustive online database and this issue’s own page, with additional resources listed in the online issue links.

With this issue under our belt, we’re hard at work on the next. Be sure to get yours by subscribing today!

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Enjoy Juiced.GS Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 2011)

Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 2011)
Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 2011)

Behind this publication’s first-ever full-color cover, you’ll find a review of text adventure Leadlight and the larger interactive fiction industry it represents; an interview with Alan Floeter, creator of Macrosoft and The Assembler; an overview of Mac, Windows, and Linux utilities for managing Apple II disk images and files; an introduction to the retrocomputing hobby; and much, much more!

Check out this issue’s links to online resources for more related content.

Don’t be left out — sign up for a 2011 subscription!
Get the latest Apple II news, reviews, interviews, and how-tos,
delivered right to your mailbox.

Now available: the entire 2010 volume at a discounted rate!

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Striking at the core of the Apple

Pick up any magazine, and by its nature, it’ll have a cover story. It could be anything from a review of a groundbreaking new product to a profile of a famous individual to coverage of a recent event.

Juiced.GS publishes all these kinds of stories and more, but there’s one story that’s uncommon in our pages: the feature. The subjects of feature stories can be as diverse as any cover story, but what distinguishes them are original research, many interviews, and the tying together of several disparate threads into a long story that’s in-depth yet of broad interest.

That’s not something that Juiced.GS has done much of, which is why the cover story of our March issue is so exciting. It takes a topic familiar to all retrocomputing enthusiasts users — text adventures — and examines its evolution not only on the Apple II but on other classic and modern hardware, looking at the triumphs and challenges the genre has faced both thirty years ago and today. Everyone from Eamon Adventurer’s Guild founder Tom Zuchowski to current-day interactive fiction spokesperson Andrew Plotkin spoke to Juiced.GS on this subject, resulting in a comprehensive review of the IF scene.

Juiced.GS has a taxonomy by which stories are filed, such as MusinGS (interviews), Cover ][ Cover (book reviews), and My Home Page (editorial). I scrolled through the Juiced.GS index, trying to find an existing category for this cover story. The closest matches I could find were the unimaginative “Cover story” or, in one instance, the similarly uninspired “Feature”.

As we hope to publish more feature stories, the staff decided to create a new genre of Juiced.GS article: “Apple Core”. These stories are meaty, in-depth pieces that go to the heart of what it means to be an Apple II user with elements to which all Juiced.GS readers can relate. As Apple Cores may require more research than, say, a subjective review or a one-on-one interview, we’ll be limited to publishing one or two Apple Cores a year.

As always, we welcome your feedback on this direction as well as your suggestions for additional topics to pursue under this banner. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the first Apple Core.

… but this story won’t be the first thing you notice about the new issue.