Sunday, August 12, 2012

Replica 1 Quick Reference, Apple 1 on the Raspberry Pi, and the return of IMSAI


Earlier I made a one page reference of useful addresses for the Replica 1. I've extended that into a more comprehensive four page quick reference. You can download it from hereThat directory also has some documents I wrote like a summary of the 65C02 and 65816 processors and some errata for Apple 1 manuals.




I recently got a Raspberry Pi board. This is a very small (credit card sized), low cost ($35) embedded desktop computer that can run Linux. For fun I compiled the POM1 Apple 1 Emulator on it. It ran quite well although it was a little slow on the Raspberry Pi's 600MHz ARM CPU. I've ordered a hardware expansion board for the Raspberry Pi called the Gertboard and plan to use if for some hardware experiments.




I've started playing with the Propeller CPU on the Replica 1. It is quite an amazing chip - 8 CPUs with shared memory, a built-in high level language interpreter as well as machine language, and hardware I/O ports. It can even generate video (which it does for the Replica 1). I'll have more to say here as I explore it further.




I'm looking forward to getting the Apple Cassette Interface when Briel computers starts shipping them. It sounds like big things are in store for Briel Computers. Vince Briel is planning to purchase the assets
of IMSAI computer. They were one of the first home computer manufacturers (along with Altair) and a portion of the company was still in business. He is hoping to restart a project they had to introduce a new replica of the original IMSAI 8080 computer.

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