Re: Official and LEGAL ways to emulate Apple II?

[steve@dosius.zzn.com (Dosius)]

jishcat@hotmail.com (Josiah Ong) wrote in message news:<93b39059.0305140823.434a4ee2@posting.google.com>...
> One possibly legal solution, athough cumbersome, would be to construct
> a small device that would actually transfer the contents of the actual
> ROM to the PC (over a serial port perhaps) just before starting the
> emulator.  The ROM image could then be removed when the emulator was
> exited.  By doing it this way, you would kind of be using the actual
> ROM.
> 
> This device could be made rather inexpensively using a PIC
> microcontroller.  My guess would be about $20.00 each, maybe cheaper
> with effort.  Actually, depending on how big the rom is, and how many
> address lines, etc, one might be able to make a device that just
> basically plugs into the parallel port, without any real electronics
> on the device at all.  These would be really cheap.
> 
> If this method of copying the entire contents to the ROM to the PC,
> and then deleting it when done is not completely legal still, then
> another solution might still exist.  This would need to have the
> reader be accessed byte by byte by the emulator, just as the real 6502
> would access the real ROM.  I think this might just be possible on the
> parallel port quickly enough.  The emulator would need to be modified
> to support this, of course.  This should be completely legal, since
> the emulator will not run without the device with the ROM chip in it.

The latter would be better.  Or ideally someone could build a PCI card
with an Apple ][ ROM chip on it.  Open-source emulators like Dapple ][
and AppleWin could be modded to support something like that without
too much hassle.

Better yet one might be able to create a chip containing a 65C02, a
couple megs of RAM, bank-switching hardware, and various ROMs (the //e
ROM and the Disk ][ ROM at least, possibly a Parallel Interface Card
ROM), and have the emulator be simply a console emulator that drives
the 6502 card (� la the LC Card).  This would truly be the ideal
solution, if it could be done.  If anyone creates something like that,
I'd be sure to drop it in my Telly Celly and try it out.

-uso.