Re: Woz says FPGApple is "COOL" !

Tall Runner wrote:

I'd love to see a fully functional GS on a PCI card that I could put in my PC.

It would have a smartport for plugging in floppy drives, but other than that,
sound, video, modem, ethernet, keyboard, mouse would all use the PC's
hardware.

Sorry, doesn't work that way. A PCI Apple card can't utilise your other PC hardware just as your ethernet card can't grab your mouse.

PCI cards can only access PCI address space, and it must be a PCI bus master in order to do that much. All peripherals it may access must be mapped into PCI address space. Granted, some of what you propose above are, but there's other issues...

The card would need to be able to find the devices in PCI space, much as the PCI BIOS generates configuration cycles in order to discover cards on the bus.

A card just can't grab and start using peripherals on the bus - whilst the host OS is running. The host OS (Windows etc) assumes it has exclusive access to peripherals and expects the state of each to be unchanged by anything else.

If you were to have an 'Apple Emulation Board' then you'd need to write a PC application/driver to virtualise the PC hardware and allow the board to access the resources under Window's control. Even then it wouldn't be able to access them directly, it'd have to communicate via the host app/driver.

However, this would be a lot of development work and for what? - you'd only be one *small* step away from every other Apple II (software) emulator already written. The PC is easily fast enough to do everything you want purely in software so there's nothing to gain. If you want a 'hardware apple emulator' you're better off doing the whole design in an FPGA and adding support for modern peripherals to that.

Something like the C-One <http://c64upgra.de/c-one/> is the way to go - a programmable platform that fits into a PC case and uses PC peripherals - that is capable of emulating retro microcomputers in hardware.

Regards,

--
| Mark McDougall | "Electrical Engineers do it
| <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> | with less resistance!"
.

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