The Card That Made the Apple II Serious

(wiseowl.com)

25 points by js2 3 days ago|11 comments

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js2 3 days ago

I hadn't seen the A2FPGA card before. It was briefly discussed on HN a couple years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41237176

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musicale 3 days ago

You could probably implement the whole Apple II on the FPGA and have LUTs to spare...

Edit: Tang Nano 20K, so fairly powerful, with 64Mbit of DRAM (enough to use as a virtual hard drive.)

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js2 3 days ago

I realize it's not an FPGA, but even in 1986 the entire Apple II was already available on a single ASIC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_II

Can get a Sipeed Tang Nano 20K FPGA Development Board from AliExpress for $7.05. I don't know the first thing about working with FPGAs, but this seems like something worth learning someday.

https://6502.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8270

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musicale 2 days ago

FPGAs are great - it's like writing software to create hardware, magically and on demand.

I wish it were easier to get started with them - the toolchains are usually designed for professional engineers rather than beginners, and the debugging experience is poor vs. any typical software IDE like VSCode or IntelliJ (even though Vivado seems to be based on Eclipse or something.)

But don't let that discourage you - working with FPGAs is incredibly fun once you get over the initial learning curve, and there are many resources available on youtube etc.

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pohl 3 days ago

I knew before clicking it was the 80 column card.

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CyMonk 3 days ago

i had counted on the z80 card instead.

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badc0ffee 3 days ago

I thought it was going to be Woz's famous Disk II controller.

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rjrjrjrj 3 days ago

It is difficult to understate the importance of the Disk II controller. Cassettes were ridiculous. Floppy drives were awesome, especially two of them (which the controller supported).

Kind of the LaserWriter of its time: a very profitable peripheral that made the whole platform work.

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rbanffy 19 hours ago

Cassettes with automation, the way, say, the Epson HX-20 does, aren't bad - they are slow, but can do random access. That said, the Disk ][ was very much ahead of its time. A bit unfortunate the Apple ][ didn't have any sort of built-in timed interrupts to make the firmware work at higher clock speeds - this locked the II to 1MHz for far too long.

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musicale 3 days ago

Forget "serious" - games were and are the killer app for personal computing devices.

How many people use Apple II emulators to run VisiCalc, after all?

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rbanffy 19 hours ago

Games might be the dominant use now, but the Apple II had a lot of business software written for it. I used Publish It to write a newsletter.