The HackFest competition, which Eric Shepherd founded at KansasFest 1998, epitomizes the Apple community. The Apple II is a powerful machine that is extremely limited by today’s standards, yet creative and innovative developers relish the challenge and fun of programming it to do things it was never designed to do. HackFest invites KansasFest attendees to produce cool, original code within the time constraints of the convention itself.
This year, four contestants underwent the trial, to great success. Scott Miller wrote the beginnings of a text adventure BASIC program based on KansasFest itself, dubbed “KQuest”. Jeff Blakeney also took a stab at adapting a known brand to BASIC when he began developing a music rhythm game akin to Guitar Hero in GSoft. Peter Neubauer, last year’s reigning champ, wrote a KansasFest trivia game, his first-ever 16-bit application for the Apple II, using a combination of Complete Pascal, SuperConvert. Martin Haye used his own Super-Mon utility to crack the copy protection on the classic role-playing game, Wizardry. These entries were judged by Ivan Drucker, Sean Fahey, and Ken Gagne, as represented by Ivan.
In first place, Martin chose the FC5025 floppy disk controller card as his prize. Peter Neubauer in second took the $50 cash prize, donated by Ryan Suenaga. Jeff Blakeney accepted a Juiced.GS 2011 subscription, while Scott Miller got a Replica I.
Congratulations to all HackFest entrants! Please continue development on your programs and release them when ready for all Apple II enthusiasts to enjoy.