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.
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.
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
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.)
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
I knew before clicking it was the 80 column card.
i had counted on the z80 card instead.
I thought it was going to be Woz's famous Disk II controller.
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.
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?