Unboxing the Carte Blance card

The Carte Blanche Card arrived yesterday.

It's a wonderfully designed piece of gear, which can emulate many other kinds of systems.
Out of the box, it supports VGA video from any 8-bit Apple ][.

You can also boot Apple 2 images (.nib files) from it, currently as read-only files.

It's a great general purpose multifunction card for the Apple 2. It can also operate as a standalone computer on a card, that can interface with other Apple 2 expansion cards.

Apple user group disks

Some of you may be interested in finding sources for Apple 2 software.

Apple2forever.org has some Apple User Group Disks, featuring the (EAC) Erie Apple Crunchers disk of month images.

The images have filenames such as EAC.82.BACK, so you'll need to rename them to EAC.82.BACK.DSK so they can be opened with an emulator or CiderPress.

The CarteBlanche Apple card is now available

Apple // systems seem to be well represented, here are the site, most recent first:

http://www.applelogic.org/CarteBlanche.html (Xilinx)
(Can either be an Apple expansion card - also runs standalone)

http://alexfreed.com/FPGApple/revisited.html (Altera DE2)
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/apple2fpga/ (Altera)
http://alexfreed.com/FPGApple (Xilinx)

Preserving the Apple ][ Way.

This site contains links to Apple 2 and related 6502 resources.

Besides the technical stuff, the main goal is to preserve the culture that inspired and sustained the Apple 2 for 20 years as an Apple product, and beyond.

In days of old (before 1980), things were different:

- Men named Steve built computer hardware.

- Students carried logic probes in their pockets and studied electrical engineering and computer science

- Companies built add-in cards for Apple 2s.

The Apple ][ had these features:

- Clean, elegant design (inside and out)

- End-user expandability and programmability

- Sharing and learning - published hardware and software documentation available to all

- Broad appeal to both hardware hackers, programmers, business people, and consumers

- Trust that the user could do the right thing.

These values are even more important today than they were 30 years ago.

When confronted with a problem today, just ask yourself: WWWD (What Would Woz Do) ;-)

For more details on the philosophy, check out some of the links to the left