The ARM idea has been around for a while. Its just a little top heavy
and maybe "way overkill" for an elegant solution. This board
http://www.srkhdesigns.com/images/ARM7+A2E.JPG takes a Texas
Instruments OMAP3530 processor (in the form of a gumstix) and
interfaces its AHB bus with the Apple II's bus. Voltage translation
and bidirectional buffers are provided for read/write as well as
"wait" to sync with the slow apple bus. It has an LCD interface, a
HDMI interface and a SVGA interface (along with the usual plethora of
integrated interfaces these processors have) that it then pipes the
processed video data out onto. The linux requirements and the code
needed to have it up and running sunk it.