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Apple Pi

A bare-metal Apple II emulator for the Raspberry Pi

stian-sorengStian Soreng
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Apple Pi is a bare-metal Apple II emulator for the Raspberry Pi. At the current state, no physical modifications are required to the Raspberry Pi. The goal is to have an emulator that will offer all software capabilities of a real Apple II.

It is currently at a very early stage, but the source will eventually be open and released under the GNU General Public License.

The emulator is the product of playing around with "bare metal" coding on the Raspberry Pi.

It's written in C and assembly and boots in less than one second, which is pretty close to the real deal.  No USB keyboard support yet, to interact you need to connect a serial terminal to the UART pins on the GPIO header.

Current screen modes supported are text, HGR and HGR2 in monochrome and paging support.  It loads a DSK image embedded in the kernel, next up is SD card support to access floppy images on the fly.

  • 1 × Raspberry Pi

  • Disk emulator demo

    Stian Soreng • 06/03/2014 at 21:48 • 0 comments

    Just a quick video to show the disk emulator in action. SD card support is still in the works, so I'm just switching between three images embedded in the kernel.


  • Disk drive emulated, works

    Stian Soreng • 06/02/2014 at 06:46 • 0 comments

    The disk emulation is finally implemented! It was a nightmare to emulate everything from stepper motor magnets to the byte encoding, but now it loads .DSK images without problems and runs games and demos.

  • Apple Pi runs its first demo

    Stian Soreng • 04/04/2014 at 06:47 • 0 comments

    The disk controller emulation is not yet in place, but I cheated a little and injected a program into the Apple Pi's memory anyway and got an old cracktro running.  I also compared the results with another commercial emulator named Virtual ][, and the results were more or less identical.


    The next goal is to finish the disk controller emulation, and then start playing with libcsud to see if I can get an USB keyboard working.

  • Speaker support, menu added

    Stian Soreng • 03/13/2014 at 22:07 • 0 comments

    A speaker has been implemented and now plays the square waves generated by the CPU.   I can tell by the sound and the pitch of it that it's not perfect, but it's something I'll work on.  The speaker is controlled by the CPU toggling one GPIO pin via the $c030 register.  Think of it as manual PWM.

    I also added an on-screen menu display.  Not all menu items are implemented yet, but F1, F3 and F12 works.  Disk support is still in the works.

    Just for fun, I tested the emulator with an Apple ][+ ROM today.  No compatibility issues, works like a dream.

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yo0810 wrote 08/10/2019 at 02:15 • point

Great!

Is this project going on?
I want to know after that.

Will you continue if development is stopped?

  Are you sure? yes | no

[deleted]

[this comment has been deleted]

Stian Soreng wrote 05/26/2015 at 07:50 • point

Hi JohnHomes, this project is not related to the "Apple II Pi" at all. Your comment is a copypasta from http://github.com/dschmenk/apple2pi and I kindly ask that you remove it.

  Are you sure? yes | no

[deleted]

[this comment has been deleted]

Stian Soreng wrote 10/16/2014 at 10:38 • point
antonizoon: Absolutely! I'm already considering a daughterboard for the Pi with keyboard and diskdrive connectors.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Stian Soreng wrote 09/29/2014 at 08:52 • point
Absolutely! I have already released an early preview (on my blog) but will release images here as well as soon as I get the SD card driver and keyboard support up and running. They are crucial to the user experience.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Henry Wait wrote 09/27/2014 at 15:58 • point
Awesome man! Will you upload a SD img somewhere sometime?

  Are you sure? yes | no

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