Any recommendations for fun / interesting / useful Newton software?

[Huxley]

I've recently resurrected my beloved old Newton 2100, and I was able to download the "UNNA Archives" which have a nearly overwhelming quantity of software, much of it with no accompanying info or context.

Given this, I'm curious: what software would you guys recommend I check out? I'm especially interested in anything that would be fun to show off or demo - games, interesting tricks, anything that would take advantage of a Lucent WaveLAN card, etc... but I'm not picky. So many people still love their Newtons, I figure there's gotta be some especially cool apps I should be checking out!

Huxley

 

[beachycove]

New software will let you run a webserver on it,  or connect to OSX with the new connection utilities produced by the Newton community. All that is easy enough if you know what you are doing.

In terms of older software, you could do something like set up Notes with custom stationery to do something specific to your world. There are some reasonably easy ways of doing that if you go looking and experiment. Beyond that, tools like Newtbasic + Newtcard especially were really cool, and can still be purchased (or could about seven or eight years back). I gather that there are other things like a wiki available (haven't tried it myself).

One of the tragedies of the Newton these days, however, is that most of the third party software you see on UNNA is orphaned, with no serials available and dead links to the companies concerned. This really limits what you can  do -- though, having said that, there is enough to make things interesting, so don't abandon all hope.

Now, if you happened to be a programmer, you could do custom software with the old tools that are now free, but that back in the day cost thousands. That stuff is all on UNNA. I gather that there are also tools for doing Newton work in modern programming environments, but as I am no programmer, I know little about either.

 

[DracheMitch]

One of the tragedies of the Newton these days, however, is that most of the third party software you see on UNNA is orphaned, with no serials available and dead links to the companies concerned.

Old versions of Surfers Serials had a Newton section.

In general Newtons just did PIM. There’s practically no games for it, while even B&W Palm had tons of games.
I had an upgraded MessagePad 120 in the late 90’s and I used it almost exclusively as an eReader. Also, I put Palm’s Grafiti on it and that made a huge difference.

 

[intric8]

I have an unlocked copy of YAZI (yet another Z interpreter). This allows me to play a few Infocom games on my Newton, including:

• HHGTTG
• Bureaucracy
• Leather Goddesses
• A Mind Forever Voyaging
• Moonmist
• Wishbringer
• and The Lurking Horror

In order to get this working (which really sucks but is the state of things on the Newton these days) I had to hunt down the original dev and beg for help. He required my device's ID number which he then proceeded to use to generate a key for me. So, you can only use your copy of YAZI on one Newton. In other words, if you put it on an external storage card, I don't think it would work.

Anyway, that all is really cool to play and I've totally played HHGTTG on an airplane before via the Newton, which was fun.

NewtPaint is also great, which I got from a very talented pixel artist I connected to online. But I see it's available here in this forum, too.

And this is super hard, but you can get a semi-working NES emulator going on the Newton. However, I spent an extensive amount of time on that project and determined there was only a small handful of games one could actually enjoy playing. But I've loaded those on the machine as well after learning how to get them in there.

I'd also recommend

• Works
• Tretris
• Labyrinth
• And to hunt down some Star Trek clip art, which is fun to mess around with.

Finally, have you ever loaded the movie clip from the Simpsons that is about the Newton's handwriting? That's fun...