Re: Gossip

[Marc S Ressl <mressl@macgui.com>]

Ok, here goes the official announcement:

OpenEmulator 1.0.3 has been released!! Right in time for KansasFest.

The main highlight is Apple II plus and j-plus support. Here goes the
feature list:

* Added the 1979 Apple II plus and Apple II j-plus
* Added the 1979 Disk II drives and interface card (13 and 16 sector), 
with support for DSK, DO, D13, PO, CPM, NIB, 2IMG, FDI, DiskCopy 4.2, 
V2D disk images
* Added the 1979 Apple 16K Language Card
* Added the 1979 Apple Graphics Tablet interface and card
* Added the 1979 Videx Videoterm 80 column card, with cycle accurate 
MC6845 emulation
* Added the R&D CFFA interface card for mounting PO, 2IMG, HDV, 
HDF, DiskCopy 4.2, VDI (VirtualBox) and VMDK (VMWare disk image) disk 
images
* Fixed CTRL keyboard problems in Apple II's 
* Added applesoft-lite 0.4 to Briel Replica-1

Some details:

* The Disk II sequencer is cycle-accurate. While this is a good thing, it
also brings some problems. This means not all NIB files run correctly
because the NIB format misses the FF36's and FF40's sync marks.
* Whenever a disk image is modified in non-standard ways (quarter-tracks,
modified address marks, etc), OE will write the file in FDI format.
* The Disk II supports two sound sets, one for Shugart and one for Alps
drives. This is handy to distinguis Drive 1 from Drive 2 by sound. But I'm
still not completely satisfied with the way it sounds.
* The Videx Videoterm is cycle-accurate. It was pleasant to try an old text
editor that writes directly to the registers and to find it works!
* To try the Apple Graphics Tablet try the disk image on the Apple II
Documentation Project. The disk image on ftp.apple.asimov.net is broken.
* You can cheat and replace the MOS6502 with the W65C02S. Just write an
emulation to disk, and mofify the info.xml file in there. This lets you boot
ProDOS 2.0.3.
* The R&D CFFA emulates an actual ATA controller. It also supports the VDI
and VMDK sparse disk image format. You can download a 32 MiB blank VDI and
VMDK on http://www.openemulator.org/features.html.

Please be warned: I have tried to make sure the Disk II and CFFA work as
reliable as possible, but please still don't count on OpenEmulator to modify
disk images. Send in bug reports if something does not work.

With the best wishes,

Marc.-

Marc S Ressl wrote:
> I've heard somebody just released an important new version of an Apple II
> emulator :-).
>