Re: A 21st Century Apple II?

[apple2freak@gmail.com]

On Mar 2, 9:26 am, mwillegal <m...@willegal.net> wrote:
> On Mar 1, 8:57 pm, adric22 <adri...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I wouldn't bother to update the design much, if any.  The only good
> > reason I can think of for building such a thing would either be for
> > nostalgia or for classroom education.  When I say education, I mean
> > for teaching the basics of how the internals of a computer work to
> > engineering students since the 8-bit systems like the C64 or Apple II
> > are so much easier to understand than a modern PC.  Now, the Apple II
> > was never my area of expertise (I'm a Commodore fanboy) but if I'm not
> > mistaken the Apple II was designed from all off-the-shelf parts,
> > right?   So it should be possible to still build one today with off
> > the shelf parts.  I'm surprised nobody has come up with a new board
> > design.
>
> The Apple II reproduction has been done, though some obsolete parts
> are hard to come by.  You can buy a kit from me.
>
> http://www.willegal.net/appleii/appleii-recreation.htm
>
> Regards,
> Mike Willegal

Mike -- very cool.  I take it your intent was to create an exact
replicate of the Apple II and not enhance it in any way?

Regarding an enhanced IIGS -- let's call it a IIEGS to save typing --
I have no illusions that such a thing would have any appeal except
perhaps to a few dozen hardcore Apple enthusiasts and hardware
experimenters.  I know there are a few people like this out there as I
have visited their web sites and seen their postings here.

I suspect that if any significant enhancements were made (which I
would like to do), that the software effort would be at least as great
as the hardware effort as well.  The GS rom code and GS/OS would need
to be reverse engineered (thankfully modern reverse engineering tools
like IDA Pro have reduced the effort required here significantly) and
then updated to support new display modes and whatever other
enhancements were added to the system.  I happen to have a copy of the
source code for System 7.1 which may help a bit in this effort as
well.  In fact, maybe System 7.1 could be backported to the IIEGS --
and this project could be started on existing IIGS systems and/or
emulators.

Regarding adric22's comments about there not being much point to such
a project other than for nostalgia and/or education -- perhaps you are
right, especially if no effort was made to update the design.
However, there would be no educational point to re-implementing the
design with discrete logic since for all practical purposes, they are
no longer used in modern designs.  Someone else has already
implemented the entire Apple II on an FPGA (see link above) as well --
in an educational context.  I think most of the point of a IIEGS
project would be in the pleasure that came from creating it more-or-
less from scratch and then using it as a platform on which one could
run old software titles along with more modern software such as mpeg
audio players, older graphical web browsers, etc.

--
Apple2Freak