Alpach Software?

As a young teen­ager in the good 'ol 90s, I wanted to show­case my Mac pro­gram­ming ef­forts on­line. After I put a site on Geo­cit­ies I met up with some guys from the mid­w­est who were in­ter­ested in some of the same things. I for­get ex­actly how the story went, but we even­tu­ally star­ted work­ing to­geth­er and scored free web host­ing for the pro­ject from the own­er of Wits and Bits, a host­ing out­fit that was around from 1998-2000. (Thanks Mr. He­witt!) I don't know if you re­mem­ber, but free web host­ing was ac­tu­ally kind of a big deal circa 1998 be­cause the only gratis al­tern­at­ives were out­fits like geo­cites. Re­mem­ber those ob­nox­ious www.geo­cit­ies.com/Sil­ic­on­_Val­ley/Flats/1234/-type URLs? Yeah. Any­way, when the host­ing of­fer came along, we de­cided to brand the site Alpach Soft­ware.

Alpach still has a live site hos­ted here, mostly to provide a down­load loc­a­tion for the source for Di­ablo II Cheat­er in case any­one wants to work on it. The site hasn't been ser­i­ously up­dated in more than 7 years, but for some reas­on it still gets around 100 hits a week. Prob­ably auto­mated quer­ies from all those mac soft­ware sites. Oc­ca­sion­ally I do still get ques­tions about Di­ablo II Cheat­er, but usu­ally they just need a re­mind­er that the soft­ware doesn't work on the latest ver­sion of Di­ablo II. Some of the search quer­ies that find this site are along the lines of "di­ablo cheat­er mac 107" so I as­sume people are still us­ing it.

At one time we owned alpach.com, back when Sam was our do­ing web design. The archive.org snap­shot didn't cap­ture any­thing ex­cept the front page, un­for­tu­nately. Ap­par­ently a freel­ance flash de­veloper in Montreal has the do­main now.

When I was 14, I tried to cre­ate a spin off called Alpach­Web to do web de­vel­op­ment. I didn't really spend much time on it, and I think the site only stayed live for 6 months or so in '99. Need­less to say we nev­er got any cus­tom­ers (thank good­ness!). That could have turned ugly pretty quickly.

My old friend, Duncan, was still work­ing on a design for Alpach as re­cently as 2003. He was us­ing it to mar­ket a ver­sion of the Christ­mas count­down soft­ware de­veloped in Co­coa for OS X.

Dur­ing those years I cre­ated a lot of soft­ware that nev­er be­came pol­ished enough for pub­lic re­lease. Even­tu­ally I lost in­terest in Real­Basic and de­vel­op­ing Mac soft­ware, but thanks to an old iMac that can still run Clas­sic and my me­tic­u­lous archiv­ing, I can bring you screen­shots of some the soft­ware that nev­er saw the light of day. I fig­ure I owe it to my former self to im­mor­tal­ize his work, even if only in screen shot fash­ion. The pro­grams that ac­tu­ally did get re­leased are de­tailed too, for their own sake.

Story Cre­at­or

This pro­ject is first be­cause it was the largest and most soph­ist­ic­ated of them. Un­for­tu­nately I was more in­ter­ested in adding new fea­tures than fix­ing bugs and re­leas­ing, so this pro­ject nev­er saw a pub­lic re­lease.

It was to be dis­trib­uted with a short story called Jac­ob's story, jointly writ­ten by my­self and Duncan. I'm a little em­bar­rassed to ad­mit that I star­ted writ­ing it to ri­dicule one of my friends who al­ways seemed to be get­ting him­self in­to amaz­ingly funny situ­ations, but even­tu­ally we changed the main char­ac­ter's name to Jac­ob and Duncan took over the writ­ing com­pletely.

Thanks to the ma­gic of Story Cre­at­or's HTML ex­port func­tion, you can now view Jac­ob's Story here, in its en­tirety! Hope­fully Duncan will not mind it be­ing pos­ted.

You can also see more screen­shots from Story Cre­at­or and read a little more about it.

Dream­s­cape

This was an in­ter­est­ing idea that someone might still be able to pick up and run with. Lu­cid dream­ing is the act of be­com­ing con­scious dur­ing your dreams and per­haps also dir­ect­ing the ex­per­i­ence in the way that you want. There's noth­ing ma­gic­al about it, and you can prob­ably have one if you prac­tice for a while. Try the "wake-back-to-bed" meth­od for quick res­ults; it's much easi­er to have them in the morn­ing after you've already slept for 6 or more hours. I ex­per­i­ence them eas­ily with this meth­od. Your brain will surely amaze you with its ca­pa­city to sim­ul­tan­eously gen­er­ate and ex­per­i­ence strange and beau­ti­ful stor­ies and vis­tas.

The idea with Dream­s­cape was to aid lu­cid dream in­duc­tion through au­dio cues played while the user was sleep­ing. Since sounds you hear while sleep­ing will of­ten ap­pear in your dreams, you could re­cog­nize these cues as a hint that you were asleep and dream­ing. The folks over at the Lu­cid Dream In­sti­tute used to sell ded­ic­ated devices that would flash lights and play sounds for this pur­pose, but to my know­ledge they aren't man­u­fac­tured any­more. Cer­tainly the cost of a ded­ic­ated device wasn't jus­ti­fied in my mind.

Dream­s­cape would also play slightly out-of-phase sine waves dur­ing the first hour to to gen­er­ate bin­aur­al beats and help the user get to sleep. I rather doubt these beats have any ef­fect on non-epi­leptic people, but it was an amus­ing ad­di­tion to the pro­gram.

You can also see more screen­shots from Dream­s­cape.

Di­ablo II Cheat­er

This pro­ject en­joyed the most suc­cess of all my early Mac ap­plic­a­tions and we got a lot of feed­back about it. It would open your loc­ally stored Di­ablo II Char­ac­ter save files and al­low you to edit them us­ing a simple in­ter­face. Bliz­zard ad­ded a check­sum to the save format in v1.08 for reas­ons I nev­er really found out, and the pro­gram nev­er worked with new­er ver­sions.

You can down­load the ap­plic­a­tion, if you have an old Mac. Of course, the ob­lig­at­ory warn­ing that it doesn't work with any ver­sions of Di­ablo II bey­ond 1.07 (they changed the save format). It seems to work fine in Clas­sic, so un­less you have an in­tel Mac or don't have Clas­sic in­stalled you should be good to go.

You can also see more screen­shots from the Di­ablo II Cheat­er.

 

En­joy­ing this his­tory of Alpach Soft­ware? See more on page 2, in­clud­ing Work Faker, Su­per Bat­tle­Bot, and more.

You could also re­turn to the front page.