Re: Another idea for outputting to VGA/DVI/HDMI

["Bill Garber" <willy46pa@comcast.net>]

"Sheldon Simms" <wssimms@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:2013032314573274770-wssimms@gmailcom...
> 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?


Have you heard of this?

http://www.applelogic.org/CarteBlanche.html

Which has a VGA bitstream created for IIe and IIgs, each.

http://noboot.com/charlie/Charlie's%20Stuff.htm

AFAIK, the DHR capability has yet to be finished.

Bill Garber
http://www.sepa-electronics.com