The ESP32 SoftCard for the Apple II

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Epic !!!!  I have some old

Epic !!!!  I have some old disks from when i was a junior that would be cool to revisit and run. I think the program was Framework III

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Wow!  That really looks good

Wow!  That really looks good actually!  Even 4.77 PC or PC/XT level performance is enough to run a ton of early MS-DOS software.

 

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Congratulations on the development

I received your card a couple of days ago. Congratulations for the work done. I haven't been able to get it up and running yet, I haven't had the time.

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You won't be disappointed! 

You won't be disappointed!  It's awesome!

 

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Project Update: x86 Emulator

Project Update: x86 Emulator

 

Well, after some heavy optimization the fastest I could get the Faux86 based emulator is about 25% faster than an XT running at 4.7 MHz and less than a third of the speed of an AT running at 8 MHz:

 

 

I also got the ESP32-SBC-FabGL from Olimex up and running and I can already tell that the FabGL library's emulator is much faster, even though it's rendering VGA. Without any optimization, it seems to be as fast as an XT machine running at 8 MHz and half the speed of an AT running at 8 MHz, which I think is perfect:

 

 

So, I'm starting work on porting FabGL's PC emulator. 

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Faux86 is good enough to run

Faux86 is good enough to run a lot of stuff but the FabGL is pretty impressive.  More than good enough to run a ton of MS-DOS stuff from the 1980s and early 1990s.

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How is progress coming on

How is progress coming on that?  Any guess as to when you may be releasing?  I think this could be super popular.

 

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Project Update

It's progressing, but there is still a lot of work left. At this point I am further with FabGL's PC emulator than I was with Faux86. I just got Hercules' 720x348 working and with that Windows 3.0 for Hercules:

 

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Wow!  Looking good! 

Wow!  Looking good!

 

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softwarejanitor wrote:Wow! 
softwarejanitor wrote:

Wow!  Looking good!

 

Thanks! Getting the various things to work using FabGL's PC emulator is taking a while, because the library was designed to produce VGA and work with a real PS/2 keyboard and mouse. On top of that the PC supports so many different graphics modes that all need to be handled differently over composite video.

 

However it has been a nostalgia trip like no other! It brings me back to the time my parents had an Amstrad PPC640 with an 8MHz V30 CPU with CGA at home and my father had an 286 AT with a Hercules graphics card at his work. (Actually my father kept the Amstrad and a couple of years ago he gave it to me. I have been working on modernizing it: click!)

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