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Re: DOES IT MAKE ANY SENSE
Jorge Chamorro Bieling wrote:
Let's say that you could buy a "gadget" card that:
-is a many-tens-of-MHz accelerator for the a2.
-has a lots-of-64k-ram-banks-expansion-card.
-allows you to connect a "vga" video monitor.
-allows you to run&see 4 a2's concurrently on the screen.
Is the a2 anyway such an obsolete thing in every other aspect (not only
the hardware) that this does not make any sense ?
Not necessarily.
You would buy it ?
I depends on whether it would support 7 or 8 Apple plug-in cards.
Otherwise, a good emulator will do the job.
Why would you buy this if you can emulate it ?
Why yes ?
Why not ?
What do you think ?
For me, the characteristic thing about a real Apple II is that is has
all the bus signals and timing, and all the real ports, including the
game port.
If someone made a very fast (optional) hardware device that could be
made to run *exactly* as a real Apple II, I'd be interested.
If the new hardware doesn't support the old peripherals, then it's
just another emulator, as far as I'm concerned.
Don't get me wrong--emulators are very useful to me, but they don't
support real Apple II hardware, so they don't replace my Apple II's.
There are situations when I need to sync my scope to a signal on
the pin of some chip inside my machines, but I think its unreasonable
to expect a hardware emulation to expose every simulated pin of the
simulated machine. ;-) So I'd be mostly content with the full set
of peripheral slots, AUX memory slot, game port, and cassette ports.
Most designers who take a run at this problem throw out the bus
and ports on their first page, and I have no interest in a special-
purpose hardware emulator. The general-purpose software ones are
already plenty fast enough and accurate enough for my emulation
needs.
-michael
Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."