Dear lovers of old computers, it is with great pleasure that I feel I can push the beta versions of my Apple II port of the famous Shufflepuck Cafe. It has been challenging and very pleasant to reach this point, and I hope that you will enjoy it, and hopefully, not find glaring bugs.

Update: it’s published!

Please play it on real hardware; emulation doesn’t do it justice¹. The requirements for this game are:

• An Apple ][+ or more recent, with 64kB of RAM or more.
• A mouse and MouseCard
• Not exactly a requirement, but: the game is visually more enjoyable on a monochrome screen.

I would love to get your bugs and/or crashes reports (success reports are welcome too of course). You can send them either here as a comment, or on the Github project issues page.

You can also send feature requests, but please be aware that I may do absolutely nothing with some of them. For example, I will not implement joystick or keyboard control. I understand some of you would love to play it without access to a mouse, but my deep feeling is that the game would be unplayable, unenjoyable, and very frustrating to play with anything other than a mouse. There is also less than one kilobyte free in main RAM, so there is not much room for anything more, and other technical considerations make things like paddle configuration, blocker, etc, not really feasible.

Here is a short teaser of the game, against one of the toughest opponent.

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Changes since beta 1 (6d7ff349):

• Fix “RESTART SYSTEM $01” message at exit
• Add Pause key
• Make the puck return faster before serving
• Fix Nerual’s service in a corner case, where they could miss the puck and not serve
• Make Nerual just a little bit less hard
• Fix Biff’s win animation
• Make win animations cleaner
• Add game loss animation for Vinnie
• Add game manual

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1. Known emulator issues
   – AppleWin mouse emulation makes the game almost unplayable.
   – Virtual ][ mouse emulation makes the game almost unplayable.
   – MAME apple2e emulation flickers awfully. Use apple2c emulation. Mouse emulation feels kind of wrong and the pointer leaving the window makes playing annoying. Use -nowindow.
   ↩︎