I'm an IT guy for the BIA under one hat...but I got started with the Apple II in 1981. Made my career, conning my Dad into using my lawn mowing wages one summer to prime the pump for one of our own.
But...retro means that I must have dropped all that for a while. Almost 20 years in fact.
I was in the PC business in a small town in Eastern Oregon for most of that time, and finally got lucky: a school janitor that was a customer was tasked with 'throwing away some old computers' and asked me if I wanted to haul the entire middle school lab away. THIRTEEN Apple IIe's with dual FDs and a lot of add-ons. HOOKED AGAIN, just like that.
I still have the best two Apple IIe's, including four working FDs.
I got back into 8-bit stuff for good in 2003, first by learning AVR assembly and then how to build hardware for them. Been learning more electronics every year. About 5 years ago I had enough resources to start buying real tools and development equipment, so I started collecting technical info on the Apple II and other retro machines. I got into building expansion boards for the Apple II, and they WORKED, and I have never looked back.
Lately I moved to Taos for my 'real work', but even in my tiny hobby area (6 feet square) I'm doing the same essential thing Dave started this project for: recapture that 8-bit vibe without all the 1980's hassles.
- my_lab060122.jpg (6.67 MiB) Viewed 1639 times
I'm currently developing (for personal use) my own 6502 based single board machine (memory layout extremely similar to the X16!), loosely following Ben Eater's videos but leveraging a LOT of my own previous work with AVRs and (lately) the Espressif Esp32-C3. Haven't got far yet, but keyboard and serial interface may be working in next few weeks, using a mega168 to supply those Nice Things it can do that I'd rather not bog down the ROM code of the '02 machine with. Using an AVR is only slightly evil, since it is STILL an 8-bit thing and the vibe is there....
WozMon running by July hopefully. Then the thing is a REAL machine.
Long term....I wanna develop some hardware and software for my machine really bad, and I might also have something to contribute for the X16. I have some very evil ideas about using the ESP32-C3 as a math coprocessor (and other things) and re-writing Applesoft BASIC to fob off floating point expression evaluation in about a billionth the time Applesoft does. Strikes me this might be a nice extension for Commodore BASIC as well?
And I want an X16 dev board...like bad. Go guys, go!
- Patrick
PS:
1) I've spent a lot of years researching retro (even if I didn't DO much), including mining a lot of old computer magazines out of the Archive.org Magazine Rack. If you are wondering how things were done back in the day, message me and I might have an idea.
2) I've also collected a ton of Apple II technical documentation, books, programming guides, etc. Any questions about resources there, I might be able to point you.
