Version 1.00 to be released soon

Almost everything is finished. I have the floppies working 100%. The serial drive is working 99.99%. It works, but the original PC code I downloaded from the web does not have the checksum calculations. I might fix this someday, but not today. The only issue I see so far is loading the ROMs when the system is first plugged into the wall. But by hitting the reset button, the system loads correctly. The ROM actually sets up two 16 Meg drives in one 32 Meg file. I had an issue with Copy II+ and 32 Meg drives. Since the PC software just reads one file, I thought two 16 Meg drives were just as good as one 32 Meg drive. I have now completely abandon the LPC ROM. It is much faster, but the thing has been repaired so many times it is flaky. I found out after I fixed the serial drive that the issue I was having with Appleworks was because the LPC ROM did not allow writes. When I loaded Appleworks on the serial drive, it works great. After getting the serial drive working, I wrote a simple ROM for the clock. I now have a ProDOS compatible clock. It is not compatible with any thing else except ProDOS, but that is all I care about.

I am almost finished building the joystick IO board. This will interface a PC joystick to the FPGA board. This will allow me to play Castle Wolfenstein the way I remember. This has been a lot of work just to play one game. But really, I am glad to be able to run all the Apple software again and not just on a PC emulator. There is just something about having hardware. Probably it would be even better to have a real Apple II. I still have two thing left to do. The first is to finish the joystick interface and get it tested. The last thing, even though I might do it first, is to test the RAMWORKS code. All I really need to do here is to load up the RAMWORKS disks into the floppy and test to see if it works. If not then I will have to debug.

I have ordered a new FPGA board. It is the same board that I have now, but has a much larger FPGA. When I finish the Apple II, I am going to add back the OSI. I want to be able to boot either system. The I am going to work on my 65C02 to get Enhanced Apple IIe support. This module might still fit into the original sized FPGA to replace the present 6502. If so, I will release a version 1.1 with the 65C02. After that, I might work on adding a third system to the same FPGA. I have not decided which system to add, but I have a preference.