Hi all,
Fresh off of a forth deep dive, I'm looping back around to the 6502 and my platform for doing the investigation is the apple iie. I really like the iie as platform, primarily because it's immediate (boots directly into basic) has immediate access to the monitor (call -151) and it's just cool - takes me back to my commodore pet, but more polished, and because in 2025, there is so much documentation, books, you name it. The resources are astounding considering the iie came out 40+ years ago.
Anyhow, The last time, I played in this space, I did have a iie and I was on Mac, so I had Virtual][, prolly the best emulation environment next to Bernard's PDP 8/e around. Well, Mac no more, I'm 100% Linux these days (debian 13 trixie across all systems). That means I need to get a good virtual iie that runs on Linux. I dug around and installed this, installed that and found that the best 3 options for me were mame (appulator apple2e), linapple (still kickin' it 10 years later), and microm8 (weird, but working). These are not as slick as the Mac stuff, but they do work. I was able to get basic, assembly monitor, dos, merlin, visual computer, floppies, and sound working (mostly for mame and linapple, but I figured it'd work about the same in microm8.
My purpose for going this road is to learn more lower level programming while having fun. I can blink an led on my pi in arm64, and my forth interpreter on linux amd64 is shaping up nicely, but those are more academic pursuits, this is both - learn something well, but at the same time have some fun. The "hardware" of the virtualized iie is immediately available to mess with, graphics are also immediate, without all of the overhead associated with similar access in a protected os like Linux, Mac OS, or even Windows. I've got my copy of Assembly Lines, Applesoft Basic, and slew of other strange and interesting docs from the lates 70's and early 80's along with literally thousands of pdfs to support my exploration. Exciting times :).
My question for y'all is, if you know these environments, what you think. Are they faithful in replicating the Apple IIe? I'm a newb at mame (it's a pain to get right, but once you figure it out, it seems like it might be the most accurate), linapple was painless by comparison, but I'm a newb there too. Heck, I'm a newb at all of it - asm, applesoft basic, apple dos, the iie for that matter, and so on, but I'm learning and having fun with it, so if you can weigh in on what you know, that'd be great.
Thanks,
Will
Well, you mentioned Linapple, and that's probably your best bet if you're 100% Linux.
There's an Apple II MAME emulator built into RetroPie if you want to play around with that on your RaspberryPi. I've used it a little and it's functional.
Aside from MAME and Linapple, there's a more recent Linux port of AppleWin. I've been using it for a while and it's very good. It's easy to build and I've tested on Intel and ARM64 (Raspberry Pis and Orange Pi 5).
https://github.com/AppleWin/AppleWin
This is a very interesting emulator for Linux that I like:
https://github.com/buserror/mii_emu
Written by someone who is active here on Apple Fritter.
KEGS (Kent's Emulated GS) is my "go to" Apple II emulator. I open a terminal on Linux and PR#1 and IN#1 in KEGS and can copy and paste between Linux and the emulator. https://kegs.sourceforge.net/ (Apple IIGS)
I also like running AppleWin running in Wine. AppleWin faithfully emulates the Apple IIe like you want. Shift+Insert to paste and you can PR#1 to a file which is a bit awkward. I really like the various monitor modes in AppleWin.
I've also used buserror's mii_emu which is good. It has a bit of an old Mac feel to the emulator window, menus and dialog boxes.
Another one to check out is JACE.
So many Apple II emulators!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_system_emulators#Apple_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_system_emulators#Apple_IIGS
Will KEGS to iie? I plan to give the AppleWin and it's linux port a shot.
I'm trying mii, it appeals, but If you "run it with no options, and there are no config file, it will present you with a dialog to select the Cards and the disk images". It's got stuff in there, do i need to specify anything to get a base line iie? It say, after reset No SmartPort Disc, Booting S6. What's that mean :)? I pointed to my merlin disk image and work disk and it ran my code, so it seems to work, didn't get any beep, but I'm willing to keep trying, but it's a little different from the others.
ok, so having your volume at 0, makes it hard to hear the beep :). Fixed and happy. What's a SmartPort Disc and an S6?
SmartPort in the terms of a //e is normally a LiRON card (with IWM chip), which was originally sold for use with the Unidisk 3.5, but also could be used with some 3rd party hard drives like the ones sold by Chinook. The //c and IIgs support SmartPort on their external floppy port as well, because they include an IWM chip. The BMOW Yellowstone card also supports SmartPort mode and there are a couple of LiRON clone cards like the one from A2Heaven.
These days few people use the Unidisk 3.5, as those are actually pretty rare. SmartPort is most often used with something like the BMOW FloppyEmu to do 32MB ProDOS images as a hard drive emulation.
S6 in Apple II parlance generally refers to Slot 6, which is the normal location for a 5.25" floppy controller.
I should have made my post a bit clearer...
AppleWin on Linux: https://github.com/audetto/AppleWin
macOS port of AppleWin (named Mariani): https://github.com/sh95014/AppleWin
Linapple is AppleWin ported many years ago. It's a very good emulator but I've found the newer Linux port to be far more stable and compatible. I use the "sa2" version. I used to use Linapple a lot when running Apple II emulation on RPi2-3 devices because it's perfect for less powerful devices like that, but with the RPi4-400-5-500 I've been using AppleWin on Linux.
KEGS is my favorite IIGS emulator. The source code was branched to make GSport and GSplus (and probably others) but I've found KEGS to be more stable.
There's a really nice macOS MAME frontent for Apple-related-MAME-emulation named Ample. It provides a nice GUI to configure the many Apple machines MAME is now capable or running.
Screenshot_20251004_085912.png
Thank you, akator2199! This is a screenshot of my laptop running Alpine Linux with KDE Plasma6 with Wayland. I am running AppleWin running in Linux using the qapple build that uses qt6. I also have a terminal window with my own 6502 emulator showing the cycles counts for the code that flips the screen every 6 and 7 cycles between lo-res graphics and text mode.
I've been using MAME appulator for a while.
At a high level, it's pretty faithful, "games work" and it is useful for quick experiments. MAME's debugger is also handy for stepping through things that would be difficult to debug on real hardware.
At a lower level, like if you are trying to write cycle-counted beam-racing demos, it's less faithful. The 6502 emulation is cycle-accurate but the video system emulation is not.
Just to throw out one more option for quick experiments, 8bitworkshop.com is very handy for assemble-as-you-type and getting cycle counts (beam-racing doesn't work, though...)
I'm using it mostly for low-level assembly exploration, but not that kind of low-level. I'm not doing much video stuff beyond putting dots and shapes on screen or moving a sprite around.
Circling back on this after messing with about a dozen. The best for my use is Winapple running in Wine via PlayonLinux. Flawless - printer prints to text file, shift-insert copies in text from linux, sound works, etc... big fan :).