Re: Accelerator / VGA Graphics card

[ole2@netrogue.de]

>If there were some interested person(s) in the Apple II community
>capable of laying out this board, it could become a reality. After
>reading the design guide I almost feel like I could do it myself,
>but since I'm not an electrical engineer and have never designed
>or laid out an actual computer, I suspect that is not actually the
>case :-). I could write the software, however.

Isn't there some other possibility of accelerating the Apple? Take some custom Logic Array (Altera, Xilinx whatever) pound it with a 65C816 core (I believe there are some free ones) and design an accelerator around that. Then filter out the memory accesses that go to certain slot address (the harddrive and maybe -as you suggest- the graphics memory) and hook those up to drivers onboard the accelerator (so the harddrive and maybe tft plugs straight into this card). Then get the Xlinix to run the core at 40MHz or so and voila you have a cool accelerator that doesn't incorporate really new technology to make the original apple look obsolete. It would just be making up for Mensch's lack of a really high-speed 65c816 design.

...and you'd still be learning a lot in the process :-)


Ole.