Another idea for outputting to VGA/DVI/HDMI

[Sheldon Simms <wssimms@gmail.com>]

Like many of you I have also thought about how to produce "modern" 
video output from an Apple II. My personal opinion as to what would 
work the best would be a second-sight style card using more modern 
components. For example, there are fairly powerful ARM SoC's with 
integrated graphics available that would be more than fast enough to 
fully emulate all Apple II graphics modes.

In fact, I'd love to make such a thing myself. Unfortunately I'm not up 
to it on the hardware side. The software isn't a big deal. My NTSC 
video modification for Applewin (http://wsxyz.net/applewin.html) is 90% 
of the way there already, as it works by simply pulling bytes out of 
video memory and running them bit-by-bit through some fairly simple 
code that imperfectly (but sufficiently) duplicates NTSC signal 
processing. All that would be necessary (in a hand-wavy sort of way) is 
to run this code on a card that captures the video bytes from the bus 
and displays them just as it does in the emulator.

I was even considering trying out a BeagleBone 
(http://beagleboard.org/bone/) to see if I could use the 40-or-so GPIOs 
available on the board to interface with the Apple bus to do the job. 
However in that case the ARM SoC would basically have to sample the bus 
at a high enough rate and I'm not sure it would be up to the task, even 
though it's a 720 MHz core. Also, it would be kind of ugly having a 
beagle bone flopping around in or behind the Apple instead of a nice 
clean card, but it might be worth trying out anyway.

Any thoughts?