Re: A 21st Century Apple II?

[mwillegal <mike@willegal.net>]

yes,
  The replica, is as close as I could come to duplicating an original
Rev 0 Apple II motherboard.  Electrically, it is identical.  In fact
all the components I use, are interchangeable with an original Apple
built system.

Regards,
Mike Willegal

On Mar 1, 10:28 pm, apple2fr...@gmail.com wrote:
> 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