AppleVision Disassembly

In 1977, Bob Bishop wrote a clever little Apple II demo called "APPLE-VISION". It was initially distributed on cassette tape, and was included by Apple on DOS System Master disks.

The program uses a clever trick to embed machine-language code inside an Integer BASIC program. When the program first loads it looks like a couple of lines of HIMEM/LOMEM/POKE statements followed by garbage:

    0 LOMEM:1800
    1 HIMEM:8192: POKE 202,165: POKE
      203,27: LOMEM:6144: CLR : GOTO
      0
 8264, RUN LOMEM:*2664439008, ^ ,
       RUN ,  ABS *2664439008, ^
      , RUN ABS *266438288; RUN ^
      , RUN 6164,=58882/42004#2112
      24576j
 2052 HIMEM: ^ $2577,"<42261 LOMEM:
 [...]

After you run it once you can see the actual program.

The disassembly is split into Integer BASIC and assembly-language components.

Commented listing of the Integer BASIC program.
Disassembly listing of the assembly-language code.
Project set - project files and binaries (requires SourceGen v1.5 or later).
Watch a video of the program playing in an emulator.