rhester72 wrote: ↑Sat Apr 27, 2024 1:05 pm
It's a super fun but super duper quirky little machine.
Definitely. A bunch of cool ideas, but I think it was really bogged down by the stringent backward compatibility requirements, the relatively slow stock CPU, and Apple leadership aligning behind the Macintosh family.
rhester72 wrote: ↑Sat Apr 27, 2024 1:05 pmIf a core ever comes to fruition, it'll be interesting to see if the vast array of peripherals (RAM card, accelerator, SCSI card, and stereo sound card come to mind) will be supported/supportable. The slot architecture alone will make a total mess of the UI. laughs
RAM expansion is practically a requirement for GS/OS to be usable. I think the main issue there is that the RAM needs to be moved into SDRAM or HPS RAM.
Stereo cards don't seem to do much other than demux and buffer/amplify the ES5503 output. Stereo should probably be the default, with the usual stereo mix option.
As for a SCSI card, the AppleWin HDD card (which is hardcoded to one 32MB ProDOS volume) is currently being used in simulation, but it hasn't been exercised much due to other issues so it's hard to say how well it will work medium/long-term. A SCSI card would be more "authentic" and potentially add some flexibility (I believe GS/OS eventually got ISO 9660 support, but was there actually any CD-ROM software for IIgs?), but also significantly more complex for both developers and users. The advantage of the AppleWin card is that it "just works" without any special drivers or configuration/formatting software (assuming that your image is 32MB).
I don't understand the system timing well enough to know what approaches to acceleration make sense, though some form of it would obviously be nice to have.
Are there any other cards that are especially useful for IIgs software? Hardware for legacy Apple II software is probably better off in the Apple IIe core.