Re: RFC : SOME IDEAS FOR THE APPLE II FPGA'ers

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:

> (I try to stay out of these vaporware discussions, but sometimes it
> gets so inflated that I feel some air needs to be let out.  ;-)
>
> Again, if it's all for fun or education--great, but this really isn't
> comp.sys.apple2.fantasy.

I take your point, although it seems like everyone chatting away here
has quite different goals, and very different ideas on what is
realistic.

If I could achieve what *I* want by buying myself an FPGA development
kit and having a bit of a play, I'd have done it by now. The problem
is, I'd like to recreate my IIe in a way that's useful beyond just
bringing up an Apple II on a development board.

What I'd like to achieve depends on connecting a physical Apple II
expansion bus, plus some dynamic ram to the dev board. I could possibly
get away with 1 slot wired by a jumper set to the dev kit, but even
then we're talking about a lot of mucking about with level adjusters to
mesh TTL to CMOS.

Unfortunately, this kind of work is nontrivial and rather expensive in
a home shop, and unless a bunch of people are interested in the end
result, and are happy with the chosen path forward, it's just not going
to happen.

If we as a collective, could sort out what we'd LIKE to have, then
possibly we could come up with a board design, chat to the GSE-Reactive
team, and see if we can come up with something *other* than just
'fantastical' discussions.

I'm keen enough about seeing this go forward that I'm happy to play
project maintainer, contribute some conceptual designs, organise
peoples collective wishes/wants and distill it into something tangible.
It's too big a job for one person, IMHO, and even if it's not, it'd be
an utter waste to develop such a thing and have it only considered
valuable by a very small group, when I believe there's actually a large
number of people 'out there' who would love to have one, and enough
collective talent to create something impressive that everyone involved
can be proud of.

Just remember, we can implement the 6502 in limitless numbers of ways
on an FPGA, and everyone would be free to use whichever design floats
their boat, but if there's no tangible platform to stick this FPGA on,
it's all just clever ideas and imagination disappearing into the ether.

Matt