Re: Not your father's Applicard

[alex.freed.007@gmail.com]

On Jan 9, 5:14 pm, mdj <mdj....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Either of those are more than adequate solutions for the z80 card. I
> imagine though that an integrated solution would make more sense on
> the generic FPGA card, since this would make it easy to ship
> 'customisers' + FPGA firmware that could be installed and activated on
> the Apple II without needing any additional tools.
>
> This would lif the appeal of the device to 'consumer class' instead of
> just 'hacker class'. Well worth the couple of extra SOIC's or tiny
> CPLD the addition would require.
>

My thoughts exactly. We'll most likely add a few gates to assess the
JTAG lines from the apple bus, but it may not be very practical. The
".bit" configuration file doesn't even fit on an Apple floppy and
somebody needs to port the Xilinx programming application to Apple.

Considering that a parallel JTAG cable is $12 from Digilent and $6 on
ebay ("buy now"), using that to load a different downloaded
configuration
may be much easier.

-Alex.