Years ago, I spent a week in the wilderness of Utah.  The night sky was breathtaking; the days were spent in canyons mostly untouched by humans.  It was an amazing experience that I will always be grateful for.  However, by the end of the week, I was happy to return to modern conveniences.

Programming the IIGS on the IIGS feels like experiencing those canyons in Utah and, overall, very authentic. I’ve relived my early attempts in all their glory and frustration. Knowing the convenience of modern development environments, the second part has been bothering me more this time. I am accustomed to syntax highlighting, large screens, fast compile cycles, and all the other conveniences. Thankfully, there’s a solution for this:

• Golden Gate by Kelvin W Sherlock
• Apple2GSBuildPipeline by Jeremy Rand
• GSPlus by Dagen Brock

With those three packages installed on my Mac, I can develop for the IIGS in Xcode and test in emulation.  This was a very straightforward installation process with one exception.  I did struggle a bit on Step 5 – Install ProFUSE. After some head scratching and overthinking the problem, I realized that from GitLab, I could simply select Repository -> Tags and then filter using the term profuse and a pkg file was provided.

With everything up and running, the function I wrote for the first lesson is formatted and highlighted as I would expect:

Additionally, compile/test cycles are dramatically shortened with this setup. Overall, I feel like this is a reasonable compromise between staying 100% authentic to the original experience and having modern conveniences.

On my second attempt at writing a game for the IIGS, I am trying to avoid unnecessary challenges. This translates into getting more comfortable buying books and tools to help me instead of trying to “just make do”. It also doesn’t hurt that I like the look of the USB drive that Juiced.GS sells containing The Byte Works’ collection of compilers and books – Opus ][: The Software.