search

freitz85 / AppleIISd

SD card based ProFile replacement for IIe
70 stars 18 forks source link

SPI ethernet extension #6

Open Sch-LikA opened 2 years ago

Sch-LikA commented 2 years ago

Hello !

I recently came across your amazing project, what an amazing piece of open-source project, thanks for your time ! I will definitively build one when I get my IIgs. As I am also evaluating options to network it, and see that in a way that project is a kind of AppleII-to-spi adapter, would it be possible to implement some ethernet via for example a WIZ5500 chip ?

Drivers would need to be written for the Marinetti ip stack but that card would become the ultimate card to own !!

Thanks again !

freitz85 commented 2 years ago

Hi, thank you for your very interesting suggestion! You are right that this is basically an Apple-to-SPI adapter. I will look into the chip to see what is possible with the current design, as there are no I/O pins left on the CPLD. But I am almost sure we will find a way to make it work. However, it will take a few weeks as I am currently tied up in other things.

Sch-LikA commented 2 years ago

Hi ! Thanks for the interest ! I came across a very interesting news : ESP-WNIC, basically you can use one of those super cheap ESP32 MCU as a Wifi interface (with or without tcp stack), interfaced through spi ... That would be a world premiere, a wifi interface for Apple II :-)

And for the i/o pins, if I understand SPI correctly, only one I/O should be needed, the "chip select" one, that could be either the sd or the ethernet, that could be NOT'ed on the ESP32 (it is a huge MCU in the end). Could one I/O pin be freed somehow (2 would maybe be easier) ?

Since the ESP32 also does Bluetooth, sky's the limit :-) ... keyboard, mouse, gamepad, ...