hackernews client

The Card That Made the Apple II Serious

23 pointsposted 13 hours ago

by js2

(wiseowl.com)

8 Comments

js2

11 hours ago

I hadn't seen the A2FPGA card before. It was briefly discussed on HN a couple years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41237176

musicale

8 hours ago

You could probably implement the whole Apple II on the FPGA and have LUTs to spare...

Edit: Tang Nano 20K, so fairly powerful, with 64Mbit of DRAM (enough to use as a virtual hard drive.)

js2

8 hours ago

I realize it's not an FPGA, but even in 1986 the entire Apple II was already available on a single ASIC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_II

Can get a Sipeed Tang Nano 20K FPGA Development Board from AliExpress for $7.05. I don't know the first thing about working with FPGAs, but this seems like something worth learning someday.

https://6502.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8270

pohl

10 hours ago

I knew before clicking it was the 80 column card.

CyMonk

8 hours ago

i had counted on the z80 card instead.

badc0ffee

8 hours ago

I thought it was going to be Woz's famous Disk II controller.

rjrjrjrj

8 hours ago

It is difficult to understate the importance of the Disk II controller. Cassettes were ridiculous. Floppy drives were awesome, especially two of them (which the controller supported).

Kind of the LaserWriter of its time: a very profitable peripheral that made the whole platform work.

musicale

8 hours ago

Forget "serious" - games were and are the killer app for personal computing devices.

How many people use Apple II emulators to run VisiCalc, after all?