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Apple2fpga: Reconstructing an Apple II+ on an FPGA (2008)
- js2 9y agoI'm surprised there's no mention of the Mega II which was essentially a IIe on an ASIC and was designed by Apple as early as 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_II
- Quequau 9y agoIt's a pity those chips aren't around anymore because I suspect that if folks could use them as a basis for an Raspberry Pi-esque DIY Apple IIe it might be really popular.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoThe scaling of marginal vs. NRE costs (not to mention core-limited vs. pad-limited chip area) has put us in the somewhat odd situation that it's actually cheaper to crank out an SoC capable of running an emulator than it is to implement the thing you want in < 1% of the transistors.
- russellbeattie 9y agoJust think... Woz designed this thing when he was 26. Amazing.
- colejohnson66 9y ago26 is a bit on the high end. Mark Zuckerburg was just shy of 20 when he created `thefacebook.com', and Bill Gates was about 19 1/2 when he founded Microsoft. But I’m not disregarding the achievement; Larry Page and Sergey Brin were about 25 when they founded Google.
- katastic 9y agoI'd say it's a lot easier to create a website than it is to create a computer in the 70's.
- colejohnson66 9y agoOh for sure. Especially nowadays with YouTube, you have 14 year olds who learned programming and then made tens or even hundreds of thousands releasing a game on the iOS App Store. I did mention Bill Gates though.
- protomyth 9y agoTrue, but there were other amazing computer hardware folks that really don’t get much credit. For example, Jay Miner’s chip development on the Atari 8-bit machines. It would be amazing to get some history with other hardware wizards of the time.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoJay Miner got plenty of credit for the Amiga. His achievements at Atari (in the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit computers) may have been less well known, but many Amiga fans know Jay Miner.
- russellbeattie 9y agoWritten in PHP no less... Zuckerburg is nothing like Woz in terms of technical knowledge, acumen and ability. The comparision is almost an insult.
- cable2600 9y agoThis brings back memories. The Commodore 65 was a prototype of a faster C64 with Amiga like graphics and sound. http://mega65.org/ http://mega65.org/ The Mega65 is a clone of the C65 with a 50mhz 4510 CPU using FPGA as well. They should all share notes.
- katastic 9y agoIt's always impressive to me that it takes a 233 MHz(+) processor to emulate a 1 MHz one. I think modern N64 emulators need at least a 2 GHz processor. (Less for ARM ala RPI, IIRC due to similarities in the instruction set.) And there's even an SNES emulator (BSNES) that needs >3 GHZ but it's schtick is that it aims to be completely accurate. *Obviously these are not hard numbers. The point is the order-of-magnitude.
- pepijndevos 9y agoI talked to some emulator folks recently, and apparently timing accuracy is almost an impossible to solve problem on non-ancient consoles. Funnily enough, there are some games that work on crappy emulators, but not on the accurate ones, until they get sufficiently accurate enough.
- flohofwoe 9y agoMost of the processing power in modern 'cycle-perfect' emulators goes into other parts than the CPU and needs to run at a higher frequency than the emulated CPU. Usually the video hardware is the most expensive. 80's home computers are essentially lock-stepped multi-processor systems, where the CPU is just one processor, the others are (at least) the audio- and video-generator. Especially the video generator can become expensive, since it needs at least be fast enough to generate a new line every 64 microseconds, and if the video generator has things like programmable resolution, color palette and sprites (which a lot of 8-bit home computers had), this can be quite a lot of "unpredictable" work per pixel. Since all those 'special processors' ran synchronized per clock cycle, it is impossible or at least very hard to write efficiently multi-threaded emulators, since they would need to synchronize threads after each emulated clock cycle (it might actually be a bit easier for newer emulated systems where subsystems are often not synchronized that strictly). Earlier emulators from the 90's often got away by skipping some of the 'cycle perfect' requirements and/or implemented some clever but complicated hacks which didn't really emulate the original hardware, that's why they could still run many games on much slower host hardware.
- smegel 9y agoBelieve it or not there is still a quarterly publication dedicated to the apple ii https://juiced.gs https://juiced.gs
- js2 9y agoHoly moly, there's still a yearly KansasFest! And you can get an Apple II ethernet card: http://www.a2retrosystems.com/ http://www.a2retrosystems.com/ I'm gobsmacked. Maybe I gave up on my Apple II too soon!
- univacky 9y agoOh, man, we're just looking at the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. There is a ton of new hardware for Apple 2s - replacement power supplies, sound cards, coprocessor cards, solid state floppy emulators, VGA drivers, and even FPGA cards (Carte Blanche). There is also new software being written for the Apple 2 - take a look at Nox Archaist, for example: http://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html http://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html
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