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Mobile Hit Flappy Bird Now Playable in 60 FPS on an Apple PC From the '70s

Flappy Bird, released in May 2013, had a meteoric rise to success. The game, in which you try to avoid pipes by tapping to increase your bird’s height, was seemingly everywhere. It’s spawned countless clones on almost every platform imaginable. It was even featured in Gears of War developer Epic’s demonstration of Unreal Engine 4 on Android phones, a few weeks after the studio’s release of its own clone called Flappy Chicken. But, until now, it had been missing from one of the first gaming platforms: The Apple II computer, released in 1977.

Developer Dagen Brock has somehow managed to get a Flappy Bird clone running on the machine, which has only one megahertz of processing power to work with. There are some changes to the game; you’re not doing any touch-screen tapping, and the limited graphics seem to make the game much easier. The port, called Flaplle Bird, is available for use on 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy disks, if you happen to still have those and an Apple II lying around. Or, you can simply run the browser-based emulator of the port.

And, to put to rest concerns about its performance on the Apple II, Brock’s port of the game runs at a silky-smooth 60 frames per second.

Do you still have an old Apple II lying around somewhere? Let us know in the comments!

Alex Newhouse is an editorial intern at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @alexbnewhouse
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