Download link: github.com/MaxPiantoni/View-To-A-Kill

As someone who's always been amused by the film depictions of computers doing various things and who has always thought about how they had to get a programmer to make up something that looks "right" for a very specific scene, this absolutely tickled my fancy. Well done.

This is NOT a waste of time. You never waste your time when you learn something. Congratulations for that funny program.

Came here from Daring Fireball - as someone who spent a while using Apple IIs, I really enjoyed this.

Dude, that's awesome! You've inspired me to tool around with my own pet project idea. No one asked you to do this but we're glad you did. Wouldn't that be incredible if the original programmer saw this. Cheers!

Fascinating. I bought an Apple 2c from John Lewis in London in late 1984 to use as my business machine. As well as the monitor, I had a second disk drive, and an Imagewriter printer. The software was AppleWorks. About a year later I bought a modem and subscription to Prestel. This was a precursor to the Web, providing text based information pages via dial-up. I was a freelance video editor, and was getting work in Europe and had set-up and account with a travel agent. They had some flight information pages on Prestel, so when I got a request, I could look up flights and book them over the phone. In the mid-1980w, this was a huge thing to be able to do. AppleWorks was a pretty powerful package. I used it for all my business documents, and the spreadsheet could invoices and quotes. The 2c remained my business machine till I got a Macintosh in the early 90s. I also had a Telex machine, so my office was pretty cutting edge! I had a go at Apple Basic, but at the time I also had a BBC Micro B with BBC Basic which I had got quite good at. This project was a lot of work, but the end result is cool. Unfortunately my 2c failed sometime in the early 2000s, and I no longer have it.

I work with a number of 20-something programmers all day (I'm 56). They have no clue about the history of their profession. This is an awesome example of the hoops we used to have to jump through that were limitations of the platform. Worrying about clock cycles and refresh times. Loved the trip down memory lane!

Kudos for going down this particular route of history and recreating the IIc’s big screen moment! That scene from my favorite Bond movie made quite an impression.

I applaud you for this effort! I was in high school at the time "A View to a Kill" came out, and I had an Apple //c, just like Stacy's. I was so excited to see my computer in a James Bond movie! I remember thinking at the time, "How did they do that?" I certainly didn't have your skill at forging the software, and I am delighted to finally see my question answered, so many years later! Thank you.

Discovered via Daring Fireball. Thank you for this, great work!

From one coder to another, well done!

Brilliant, 007... Absolutely Brilliant !

I was asking for it, but I didn't know it yet. It's a great demo. I love it. I think you could get the beep beep sound to work too.

I love living in the nerdy intersection of this particular Venn diagram of interests!

Just found this and downloaded it. Ran it on my iie. Later in the day heard that Tanya Roberts (Stacy) died. RIP

Cheeky fun, that is inspiring! Very funny! Well done (the video) 👍😊

Great job! Beagle Bros. really made my life on Apple ][s worth living. Such great tools.

Not an apple guy but really enjoyed the way you explained and progressed through the project. Well done.

This gives me an energy boost today to keep pushing forward on my own development project which nobody asked for and is a waste of time (but which is teaching me a whole lot about Pico-8 development). Great video!

Excellent work! As a fan of both old computers and James Bond movies, your video was extremely entertaining! Keep up with the good work!

"[other] esoteric projects"? Sure, let's go with "esoteric" for this one. ;). This is AMAZING. What a nerd. (my people!)

This is pretty cool! It's nice to see this older programming :)

WOW, watched it all, that was awesome and well done 👌

This brings back lots of memories! Love this authentic forgery of Stacey's computer. Awesome!

As a diehard fan of both Apple and James Bond, I enjoyed this.

What a delight to see your explorations, and your code. Thanks a a lot for sharing both, the video, and the code!

Great job! Not only did I watch your video, I've watched it a couple times and downloaded your disk image. It's hardly a waste of time. P.S. Love your little idea of the monitor on your //c. I did the same thing, even painted it white, put a little Apple logo, and screwed it to a little 3d printed block that lays in the void the handle leaves when it's proped up. This computer series is an icon, and it deserves the attention it gets in movies, KZfaq videos and even new hardware and software even now, decades after it's been discontinued. Apple // Forever!

Well done mate 😁

Here from the B3ta newsletter. It's a very nice project that no one was asking for, but was a fun and riveting 15 minutes.

This was amazing, watched this movie so much as a kid, and was mesmerized by your recreation. Well done!

I watched this video to the end. Thank you for it.

Congrats Max! I learned to code doing graphics in Applesoft BASIC, so this was superbly satisfying to watch. :-) Also, it's cheating writing readable code with those many columns!

Well done indeed!

Beagle Bros! What a blast from the past. Thanks for the thoroughly enjoyable nostalgia trip.

So great Max! Enjoyed all 14min of you geeking out over this

Saw it first on the RCR Podcast and heard it again from John Gruber. Just watched to the end, since you asked. Thanks for the video; it was really fun to watch!

Impressive work.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the guy or gal who wrote the original code was still with us and saw this video.

insanely accurate reproduction 🙀

Absolutely fascinating -- great job and this was well worth the watch!

Awesome work my friend.

Nicely done vid. not averse to more.

Maybe you could hit some wargames scenes? Fun little project.

That's really fun, thanks!

Fantastic, thank you very much for putting this together.

Great work. I also followed the DF link. Might have to watch the movie again. Tech really dates movies fast, but the nostalgia can be fun.

I just finished coding a carousel into a popup menu in Swift in SpriteKit (not quite 8-bit, but pixelate none the less), not quite the same, but nice to finish. It's 11pm now, and I'm off to bed, but decided to watch this none the less. I would greatly encourage you to finish the Gun-barrel graphic, if you have time..

I love your intro with the Kid Pix sounds. Brings back hella memories from early childhood.

I'm forgetting the details, but I remember back in the 80s that a magazine published an Atari 8-bit program that was used on the TV show Whiz Kids that was used when an actor was supposed to be typing on the computer. All the text was predefined and when any key was pressed, the next correct character was displayed. This let them produce text synchronized with the keypresses, but they didn't have to worry about typos. I haven't been able track down the magazine or software, though I remember typing it in.

Absolutely awesome! Also awesome to hear someone else say Beagle Brothers! #gple4ever

I had an Apple //c just like this when I was a kid. Complete with the matching CRT green screen, too! (And, please, it's definitely "//c", not "IIc" !)

Very cool, if you liked doing this you ought to look into Dharma Initiative apple ][s from Lost the TV show

Fantastic work. Great attention to detail! Every Apple ][ should have this along with Mindscape's A View to a Kill text adventure game.

RIP Stacy ... : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Roberts

Interesting video. Well done.

this is so cool!

Thanx, really interesting!

We made it to the end Max!

Awesome.

I'm actually willing to suggest that the code was written in Apple Pascal. It has several features here that would come in handy: The "turtle graphics" library could have used vectors (move turtle - draw), and that would allow drawing of the map as opposed to saving as a hi-res image. Next up: The Pascal library has the ability to write text and characters on the screen - any location, and allows this without 3rd party tools, nor does Pascal require shape tables for this (to be fair, I think behind the scenes, it did use shape tables for characters in hi-res mode). So, to write say Organ Trail, then pascal was used. The other HUGE advantage? Well, pascal is a VERY nice block structured coding language with things like global and local variables. Thus say when you go into town to buy things, that code module can be loaded off disk, and loaded on demand. and when you leave town then that code module (and memory, and all variables) are now un-loaded from memory. So, this means that Pascal allowed a program as large as the whole disk drive, and bits and parts of code can be loaded on demand (kind of like a .dll on windows , .dll = dynamic link library if you wondering). So, my bets are Pascal was used. The other advantage is Pascal would usually run about 2-4 times faster then AppleSoft basic, and EVEN better was the Pascal code was compiled, and thus code was stripped of comments and source code - making the smaller compiled p-code smaller then what the same code in AppleSoft basic would be. (to be fair, both Integer and FP BASIC on apple used tokens for each keyword). I wrote a Payroll system for the Apple II - including the payroll tax calculation parts. Pascal was a FANTASTIC development language, and a code and block structured language was not only great, but was also far better then AppleSoft at memory management, and that on-demand loading of code, and release of variables in code? Rather nice! so, I think that any professional development firm hired for that James Bond filum? I'm betting they used Pascal for this, including the Turtle graphics library that allows characters to be written at any X,Y location on the screen - just like Organ Trail does.

Great video Max! Very fun! A couple tips: if you edit BASIC with a text editor, and then use EXEC to enter it on the Apple II, you can save a lot of memory by removing the line numbers from your REM lines so they do not get stored into AppleII memory. Also, why not use the SCALE command to draw your circle shape at different sizes instead of creating multiple circle shapes of various sizes?

nice

This is cool, thank you!

Incredible!

Nice!

A random thought- the circle quadrants remind me of the crosshair on the Apple II video game's box art.

This video was more enjoyable than the movie! Well done.

Amazing work, Max. Truly incredible. I can confirm it works on my IIc, but there is one caveat. I tried running it from my FloppyEMU attached to the external drive connector. I used ROM Xc and ROM4X to make the External 5.25" the boot drive, but sadly, ROM4X doesn't work insofar as it polls the internal drive (nothing in it) forever. In other words, it won't work with ROM4X via FloppyEMU attached externally. I just installed the BMOW Drive Switcher (a hardware switcher, unlike ROM4X), and that works. But some people probably only have ROM4X, so I'm curious if there is something in your code that might be causing the IIc to poll the internal drive (bypassing ROM4X), such that it won't work without the BMOW hardware hack.

Awesome

👍👍 a very worthwhile endeavor. enjoyed start to finish. I bet you'd love to see their code? Next you must do War Games on the IMSAI 8080.

It's honestly pretty cool, James bond had a habit of showing off the latest of technology at the time along with fantasies that would later on come to fruition in a very sci-fiesque way. Of course the movie props are always simplified and made in such a way that caters to the filming and plot rather than the function, but i've always imagined in the real world this scene would have taken a couple of minutes from dialing up to the mainframe at the meteorological center over a serial modem (Totally plausible even at the time) and accessing the data, but the result would have been much slower and less visually interesting and mostly probably just RTTY text rather than complex vectors (maybe) But - it is a fun bit of typical James Bond foreshadowing on technology that of course eventually became very normal, these days we just pull up a web browser and view the results in seconds. As a side note, the Beep beep beep boooop they often played was a very basic (and very overused) sound effect they added in post whenever a computer was involved in any scene. Very 70s thing to do because apparently every movie that involved computers had to add beeps and boops to every scene involving a computer because i guess that's what people with no experience using them thought was a normal thing for a computer to do always, out of context. :D i'm glad that's not something computers actually do in reality, because i'd get very annoyed fast if doing any task on my computer resulted in a constant beep beep beep booop day in day out.

So good! Thanks for putting this out there.

Awesome, awesome, awesome!

Excellent video. I really appreciate the love put into every detail. Maybe you can list the tools used on the PC side for image conversion, disk image creation, etc?

Enjoyed it thanks Max!

Pretty sure I remember from forever ago, (sort of), an article about this scene that said the graph of the "earthquake" was actually a digitized waveform of a sound...

Great, thanks! :)

love it

I live near the center of the target circle! Castro Valley. There is an old Nike missle battery above Lake Chabot there at the dot in the center of that circle.

I can't say I remember this in the film, but interesting as this was still still a UK production movie I guess, and the apple II never took off so I propose this prop and software was done by a US team?

This is such geeky goodness. ❤️

This is the best kind of wasted time, congrats 😍

Thanks! This was fun 🙂

This was great, thank you!

a lil jealous!

Great job!! I am wondering if you would consider tackling the stealth plane secret video on 'Cloak and Dagger' next. That movie focused on Atari 5200 and an 800XL would be a typical computer similar to that console.

Thanks so much for sharing: awesome

for what it's worth: the font used for the map's text is different

Neat. Funny how computers are used in movies doing things they cannot actually do.

What about the Apple II programm from the TV Show Lost

the disk image link doesnt work

Awesome! :D

Excuse me, Max... Could you tell me - is it a forrrgery or a rrreplica? 🦇

Love it!

Hi Max, I still have my Apple //c, so appreciate your program. Can I ask what you are using for a monitor with your system? Is it just using the composite out for monochrome, or does it also do colour? I have a PAL Apple //c, but no monitor.

Now you should publish the code on Gitlab/ Github :)

C=64 port when?

That was fun and frankly the most I had ever seen of the Apple IIc. Why wouldn't they just have plotted the graphics for the text on the first screen also, rather than having suffered with the fonts?

Ha that's brilliant, very interesting deconstructing these programs that looked so cool at the time. On the beeping noise, the same one was in numerous Bond movies for 'high-tech' computers. You can hear it in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) when Bond is reprogramming the Submarine Tracking System - amazingly there's a KZfaq clip: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hK-Bg6ya09GpnZc.html Computers seemed to be pretty noisy in those days!

Would make a nice tool if it showed real USGS data.