MacFly's blog

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What does an Apple II VGA Card, a Z80-CPM SoftCard and an USB-Apple II Mouse Interface Card have in common? Well, almost everything. All three are the same card. Same hardware. Just differing software. The magic of software-defined hardware. It can emulate many things. It just depends on software.

I started a project to add USB support to the Apple II - extending the PICO-based Apple2 VGA cards. The cards are based on excellent work by Mark Aikens, David Kuder and others. The hardware is using the surprisingly powerful and flexible PICO microcontroller. The first and most obvious application of the A2USB project is a complete Apple II Mouse Interface Card emulation, supporting a USB mouse.

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Imagine in 1980-something you started your Apple ][, /// or //e - and you had 8 gigabytes of storage... Mind blowing?

Well, if you have a DAN][ Controller card, you can now easily boost your 1980s machine to 8GB. In decimal numbers, the maximum usable storage now supported by the DAN][ Contoller is actually 8.59GB. That would certainly have spooked Doc Emmett Brown in 1985 - though he'd have pronounced it "8.59 jigobytes", of course... But no need to accelerate to "88 miles per hour". All it takes is a simple firmware update.