Re: A wishful thought?

[stevementzer@earthlink.net (Steven W. Mentzer)]

>
>I was wondering about the possibility of someone developing a IIGS on a card,
>preferably with a PCI interface that will allow operation on a Mac or PC. For
>that matter an external connector for a small box to allow for the usage of
>original Apple cards like the Apple Video Overlay card etc. Perhaps even
>connections for Apple floppy drives, built in support for the 14MHz chip would
>be other features I'd like to see.
>
>Are there any hardware designers out there that could take this on? And what
>would be the costs involved?
>
>But as the title on this post indicates, it's only wishful thinking, but it 
can be fun.


Designing and building a IIgs on a PCI board, while being a LARGE project (and 
a very complicated one at that) would not be groundbreaking... 

The biggest problem would be the aquisition of several apple-only parts (the 
IWM, IIgs ROM) among other legal issues.

While apple computer doesn't seem to mind the distribution of the IIgs ROM in 
binary format, I am pretty sure they would mind the sale of a hardware design 
they copyrighted years ago..

The only way to get over this legal hurdle would be the development of a 
reverse-engineered IIgs card. That is a HUGE task.... 

A happy medium to me would be the development of a IIgs/emulator coprocessor 
board. You know... a PCI board with a 100Mhz i486 on board that would run an 
emulator in the background, with the OS on top interfacing with it to handle 
input and stuff.

There are a whole lot of emulator cores that have already been written that 
could handle the task..... 

smentzer@pacbell.net
smentzer@pacbell.net