Open letter to Apple ][ hackers Re: Official and LEGAL ways to emulate Apple II?

[steve@dosius.zzn.com (Dosius)]

Rob <rsteinmetz@mindspring.com> wrote in message news:<3EB7A980.6000503@mindspring.com>...
> Some Apple][ clones used legal ROM's ( the Laser 128 comes to mind ). 
> Perhaps some of the Apple ][ emulators use a similar approach, and have 
> developed legal equivalents of the Apple][ ROMs.

SimSystem IIe, but it has compatibility issues with all versions of
Windows and with certain machines' hardware.

I believe the copyright on the Laser 128 ROM was Central Point
Software, and that they are now owned by Symantec (!).

I would like to issue a call for anyone who knows how:

I am the author of Dapple ][ (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dapple),
which runs under DOS, has no issues under Windows 98SE and is reported
to work under ME (and claims or the program working on XP have been
reported).  I am currently working on porting the emulator to Windows
95+/NT/2K/XP.

The issue is that ROM code cannot be legally distributed with the
emulators (see earlier in the thread for word from the horse's mouth).
 For small things like the mouse driver this is no issue. 
Unfortunately, what we need is a clone of the Apple //e or //c
firmware.  I can alter my emulator to suit unique banking mechanisms
which could be required by such a ROM image.

There is a nice development environment at http://www.cc65.org/ which
could perhaps be used to build this code.  It includes a C compiler,
assembler and linker targeting the 6502 and 65C02.

Ideally, the "Emu2" system should be relatively compatible with the
installed base of Apple ][ software; a very large archive is available
for testing.  Those of you who might be interested perhaps already
know where it is; because of the legality I will not provide the
address here, but will refer to it simply as "Asimov".

Dapple ]['s hardware emulation at this time is a parallel port (1), a
ProDOS block device (5), a mouse (2) and a dual Disk ][ controller
(6).

The ideal method for going about this would be for one hacker or group
of hackers (I use this in the Jargon sense, http://catb.org/jargon/)
to create a full listing of entry points (switches in the
memory-mapped I/O area are documented in Dapple ]['s MEMORY.C and
elsewhere), and a second hacker or group of hackers to implement code,
without reference to an actual ROM, that would imitate the behavior
determined by the first group.  As I have discussed elsewhere, this is
the method by which the first legal IBM PC clones were developed.  The
advantage is that since both Dapple ][ and AppleWin have source code
available, the emulators can be made to fit the ROMs, and we do not
have to bank in the exact same manner as other systems.

If this could be done successfully, I would include the resulting "ROM
image" with my emulator and encourage others to do likewise.  We would
finally have a legal ROM for use in emulators.

If anyone is willing to help, please e-mail me at
sysdev%40dosius%2Ezzn%2Ecom.

Thank you.

Steve "Usotsuki" Nickolas