My 2 cents worth again. If Apple designed the functions of the //e and
put it on the motherboard of a //Gs it seems possible to design a //gs
on a pci card that fits in a peecee. The Apple Macintosh plus was done
on the Atari using Macintosh roms mounted on a card installed in the
Atari. I remember there was a //e card for the peecee world that worked
quite well in the schools where I live. I own a //e emulator card that
was installed in 2 slots on a Apple ///. I used that Apple /// a lot
because it had a 320k ram disk and was a lot faster then my //e. I put a
65CO2 processor on my Apple /// logic board and everything worked ok.
Plus I had the extended keyboard on the /// so I could use all of its
keys. This was before the //Gs came out and I think that Apple /// //e
emulator cost under 500.00 which seemed to be a deal at that time. The
Apple //Gs platform is still being used a lot over in France and other
parts Europe so maybe marketing this //Gs pci might sell better then
anybody thinks.
Al
-----Original Message-----
From: Apple2list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Geoff Strickler
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 12:03 PM
To: Apple2list
Subject: Re: TransWarpGS Needs (was RE: CFFA adapter's 4th run)
Correct, and we're looking at all those options. We would like to make
some improvements. The issue is that any significant redesign will add
more to the cost than would be offset by lower cost components because
production volume will be very low.
It will probably use newer FPLCAs, RAM, and CPU, which will reduce the
chip count (and cost), but the time to write a 65816 HARDWARE emulator
(remember, we would have to emulate all the CPU signals to the
motherboard and MMU) isn't justifiable unless we can sell at LEAST 5,000
units and that's beyond believability.
None of us are planning to get rich doing this, but we can't afford to
give away all our development time either. In small market development,
it's either a labor of love and compromises, or it's really expensive.
> From: "Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Reply-To: Apple2list <apple2list@mail.maclaunch.com>
> Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 06:41:49 -0400
> To: Apple2list <apple2list@mail.maclaunch.com>
> Subject: Re: TransWarpGS Needs (was RE: CFFA adapter's 4th run)
>
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 11:41:16PM -0500, Geoff Strickler wrote:
> If memory serves me correctly, the TWGS was a multilayer board with a
> daughter card and two or three dozen ICs. That would make it very
> expensive to reproduce. Worse yet, the card may need to be redesigned
> if some of the components are no longer available.
>
> The advantages of designing a new card from scratch: RAM is cheap
> today. You could create an 8 MB IIgs, and just mirror the memory that
> is used for hardware access. While I cannot claim to understand the
> TWGS, I'm willing to bet that that type of design would use fewer
> support chips than using a cache based approach. Relatively fast CPUs
> are also available today. You could write a 65816 CPU emulator to run
> on a non-native processor, and still have enough processing power
> available to take care of all of the house keeping (eg. mirroring the
> relevant bits of RAM).
>
> Byron.
>
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