Re: Hardware Project

[dcross1@nospam.home.com (David Cross)]

In article <david.911171291@wraith>, david@uow.edu.au says...
>
>Paul Schultz <pschultz@med.wayne.edu> writes:
>>It's great to see someone working on an Apple II hardware project!
>
>All this discussion about Apple II cards has made me revisit an idea I had
>in the past to simplify designing cards for the A2.
>
>Most any card you design with on-board ROM needs to decode all three selects
>(DEVSEL, IOSEL and IOSTB) and generate chip selects for ROM, devices and the
>data bus buffer. This tends to take quite a few LSTTL chips. My idea is to
>replace these with a single PAL/GAL (plus an 8 input NAND gate) to take care
>of all this (including the CFFF disable function). It will also allow for the
>use of RAM instead of ROM as this makes code development much easier.

If I understand what you're saying, you propose to replace three separate chips 
(?) or groups of code with one chip, or more condensed code.

My question is: Was there a reason why this wasn't practical or possible, say, 
10 years ago when the Apple // series was a going concern?