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Entry 1: The Inspiration

A project log for Aiie! - an embedded Apple //e emulator

A Teensy 4.1 running as an Apple //e

jorj-bauerJorj Bauer 02/19/2017 at 10:550 Comments

Those of you following my feed (pffft - like anyone would do that) know that, a month or so ago, I spent a sick day at home debugging old Apple II software. Well, it turns out a lot of people are just as crazy as I am; that project now has 2.2k views. That got me thinking about *who* was looking at it, and from *where*. A little bit of stumbling around the interwebs later, I happened upon the Reddit Apple2 sub, where someone had posted a link. And a couple posts before that one was something that truly caught my attention: a post titled "Handheld emulated Apple ][ on ATMega 1284p".

Now, I have no idea how I missed this when it was posted on Hackaday back in December. It would have totally captivated me then. But having seen it now, I knew two things.

1. This is all wrong, because it only addresses 12k of RAM and runs at 70% of the correct speed.

Don't get me wrong - that's still an impressive feat for having jammed it in to an AVR. It's a really cool proof of concept. Which brings me to

2. I had all the parts in my house to build a version that ran at full speed and addressed all 128k of an extended Apple //e.

While I wasn't entirely sure if I should be happy or appalled with all the spare parts lying around my workshop, I knew with certainty that I'd be building this. And this is the build log for what is now a fully functional, 100% speed, 128k of RAM, Apple //e emulator.

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