Subject: Re: Modern A2 successor
Path: lobby!newstf02.news.aol.com!portc01.blue.aol.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.slurp.net!not-for-mail
Message-ID: <398071AC.A14A8622@inetnebr.com>
From: Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
References: <397dee7b$1@hal.grnco.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Lines: 29
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 12:30:20 -0500
NNTP-Posting-Host: 206.222.213.164
X-Trace: newsfeed.slurp.net 964718561 206.222.213.164 (Thu, 27 Jul 2000 12:22:41 CDT)
NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 12:22:41 CDT



Here is what a friend of mine is working on, well, thinking about, what he's
working on is an ethernet card that he hopes to demo to our AppleLinc club in
October. He worked on my ZipGSX and got a few ideas, I made a few contributions,
and if it will all work and fit on one card the idea is this:

A PPC based turbo card (603 or 604) with onboard RAM (16 megs make sense) and
possibly Ethernet and IDE (I suggested SCSI but Bill thinks IDE makes more
sense. This card would be for the IIGS (though I suppose an IIe could be
made....), the machine would launch a 65816 software emulator and then load and
run GS/OS. Unlike Bernie or Sweet16, the firmware is still on the IIGS (though
it would be mapped into the PPCcard's memory space) and there is no need to
emulate the IIGS hardware, since the hardware is still there. Bill is looking
for a 100 mhz PPC, in sufficient quantities to be *cheap* enough to use. He
points out that Apple did something like this when they first moved to the PPC
on the Mac, and it shouldn't be *too* hard.

Unlike a whole new machine, this should be doable, and not too expensive. It
will preserve the Apple II while giving much more speed and power, as well as
the possibility of running PPC based Linux on an Apple II - cool huh?

Please be aware that this is pure vaporware at this point. The research for his
ethernet is done, he has chips from AMD and is working on the the prototype.
Only when the ethernet is finished (and he isn't interested in a //e version)
will he move on to the PPCcard. His third and final flight of fancy is VGA for
the IIGS, but the other two first.

Roy