Evening all:
I am considering building an A2VGA board outlined in skate323k137's the blog entry.
Five boards from PCBWay look like they will run me about $33. Is anyone interested in splitting the cost?
I won't need 5 boards and thought this might be an option to save me and up to 4 friends a few bucks in fabrication costs.
If anyone is interested in splitting the cost of these please let me know. The boards are $6.6 each ($33/5) + cost to ship it to you.
Drop me a PM if you want to join me in the purcahse. If more people want some, I guess I could increase the order from PCBWay.
Oh, I planned to order v1.2 boards, but if there is an advantage to v1.3 or greater, please let me know and I can order that version.
Cheers,
mark
The V1.6 version looks like the best one yet. It includes the option to make it an A2USB card cleanly without mods. You may want all 5 so you can make a couple VGA, a couple Mouse and maybe one Z80..
FWIW, I already built 4 of the Briel boards, 3 of the V1.1 and 5 of the V1.2... but I just ordered 5 more of the V1.6 boards...
these things are like potato chips... can't build just one.
I have a lot of high quality 1.2 boards if you need. I have them on eBay, but for members here, I can also do what I did with the briel cards, 5 dollars a card plus 5 dollars domestic shipping. (I also have plenty of those, fwiw). If you use the ENIG etc. specs I used but only order 5-10 it's more like $12/card.
I'm considering having some v 1.6 made for mouse support. Since I do double ENIG thickness etc., I have not yet pulled the trigger on a large order of those.
I wonder if both the VGA output and the mouse interface will end up in a single card soon.
I get the impression that the Pico may not have enough grunt to do it. But maybe if someone really optimized the code it wold be possible. That would be nice since it would take up one fewer slot that way.
Maybe it could be done if an ESP32 was used instead of the RPi Pico, since the ESP32 as you informed me, is capable of much higher clock speeds.
Another possibility might be to put two RPi Picos onto one card. There's plenty of room in an Apple II for far larget cards than any of these, even the relatively larger Briel version.
I like the potato chip analogy. :-) That makes a lot of sense. I could see that being the case.
I haven’t looked at the code, but I have a strong gut feeling that even one Pico aught to be able to do it. It’s because I'm pretty sure the ESP32 can do it, which is based on what it can do using this board:
ESP32 FabGL.JPG
The Pico is slower, true, but it’s not that much slower. It's about half the speed. But if the ESP32 can produce VGA at 60 Hz and handle a PS/2 mouse and keyboard while emulating an 8 MHz IBM-PC, then one Pico should be able to do both the VGA and the USB mouse interface on the Apple II.
I realize I’m comparing apples to oranges, but they both have similar nutritional value, which is way more than a potato chip. :)
Maybe it would be better just to create a VGA card using the ESP32 to begin with, then there wold be no question it would have the power needed.
MFA2LAB (AKA Kboo-HK) in Hong Kong emulated the entire Apple II including video with the ESP8266...
http://www.mfa2lab.com/apple2-emulator-on-esp8266/
https://ct6502.org/product/mfa2-16emu/
It's too bad that all those things from MFA2LAB are always OOS.
wDrive and SoftSP cards are also always OOS. I wouldn't mind getting another wDrive or two if they were ever available.