The ESP32 SoftCard for the Apple II

Epic !!!!  I have some old disks from when i was a junior that would be cool to revisit and run. I think the program was Framework III

Wow!  That really looks good actually!  Even 4.77 PC or PC/XT level performance is enough to run a ton of early MS-DOS software.

I received your card a couple of days ago. Congratulations for the work done. I haven't been able to get it up and running yet, I haven't had the time.

You won't be disappointed!  It's awesome!

Faux86 is good enough to run a lot of stuff but the FabGL is pretty impressive.  More than good enough to run a ton of MS-DOS stuff from the 1980s and early 1990s.

How is progress coming on that?  Any guess as to when you may be releasing?  I think this could be super popular.

Wow!  Looking good!

Incredible what you are doing here. Thanks so much for adding all these cool systems and features. Cheers

Dave

Wow that is impressive progress!

TGA is enough to support a ton of software that was written for the PCJr, Tandy 1000SX and a lot of XT level clones of that era.  It will still be quite an accomplishment.

CVT wrote:

The TGA is a success! The format is very close to 4-color CGA, so it was very easy to add.

 

Here is Commander Keen 4 in 16 colors, which originally was never released for TGA, but fans recompiled it later:

 

[[{"fid":"38254","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","alignment":""

I was already excited but Keen is amazing, such a big part of my childhood PC gaming! 

Looks good!  This is going to really make the ESP32 Softcard highly sought after I think.  Is that PAL or NTSC output?

I really can't tell much difference between those two, they both look good.

The NTSC image looks less clear to me in comparrison, particularly in the lower right corner where it says "Press F1 for Help"

Even the "slow" ones seem to be fast enough to be playable. I'm favorably impressed.

In case someone else needs a CGA to SCART converter, I made a board for CGA/SCART/VGA conversion.

https://github.com/profdc9/CGA2Scart

Dan

profdc9 wrote:

In case someone else needs a CGA to SCART converter, I made a board for CGA/SCART/VGA conversion.

https://github.com/profdc9/CGA2Scart

Dan

 

That's pretty cool.  Unfortunately SCART was never a thing in the US.  It's too bad because it would have been better than some of what we did have back i nthe day.

Yeah, I tried that.  It didn't work for me because:

1.  The CGA didn't provide 5 V.

2.  The video device required the vertical blanking interval to be inverted so that HSYNC and VSYNC needed to be XORed with each other.

3.  Also, some devices are picky about having a minimum interval for the HSYNC and VSYNC signal.

Given this, I made mine able to be jumpered to different configurations to try different variations of the sync signal (CSYNC vs HSYNC, inverted vs. not inverted, XOR, etc.)

I just got mine in the mail today, fresh from Bulgaria.

I haven't had a chance yet to install and try it out but that's on my agenda for this evening and I'm looking forward to giving it a spin. And I'm looking forward to trying the PC emulator features when those become available.

I just wanted to say thanks to CVT for his work on all this.

MPBApple wrote:

I just got mine in the mail today, fresh from Bulgaria.

 

I haven't had a chance yet to install and try it out but that's on my agenda for this evening and I'm looking forward to giving it a spin. And I'm looking forward to trying the PC emulator features when those become available.

 

I just wanted to say thanks to CVT for his work on all this.

Well, I installed it and it's been a little hit and miss for me. At first I'd do the "BRUN ESP32NTSC" and it's detecting the card in slot 1 okay, detects the mouse interface in slot 4, and then it wouldn't show anything else. I thought maybe I did something wrong so I checked and double-checked the speaker and video inputs and outputs and everything was fine, so I booted up again and this time when running it, it actually showed the Softcard prompt that time. Whew.

I was able to launch DOOM and play a little although I don't really know the controls too well. Playing with the joystick is difficult, and moving with the mouse equally so, but maybe that's just me.

I then rebooted, tried again and ran the MAC emulator which came up okay... the mouse cursor had a drift though so clicking on things was a little hard. I clicked to open the "Games" folder and it seemed to hang or something... mouse cursor went away and I couldn't do anything else.

At that point, power cycling and trying to run it again, I was back to the original problem where it detects the card in slot 1 okay but then I never get the "Please plug the monitor through the card" message and it just sits there. Hmm...

It has firmware 2.01 on it... other details about my system:

Apple IIe with 80-column card, serial card (slot 2), disk II interface in slot 5, another disk interface in slot 6.

I'm using a FloppyEmu to boot the DOS 3.3 disk.

I do have the ROMxe BIOS installed if that makes any difference.

Any thoughts on anything I could try to help make it reliably start? I was encouraged that it started working after the first few failures and thought maybe it was initializing something from the memory card, but then when the issues came back, I'm not sure what to do next... wipe the memory card and restore from how it came originally, in case something on there is damaged? Try a different mem card?

I let it sit a bit, had dinner, went back and turned the Apple IIe on and it loaded up the ESP32 interface just fine this time. Played some NES Choplifter, calibrated the joystick and mouse, etc.

It did hang up at one point. When I calibrated the joystick, I hit Ctrl-Q when I was done and then typed MOUSE to check that out as well. It showed the screen but then it was hung up... moving the mouse didn't do anything. I hit Ctrl-Q and it actually went back to the prompt, so I typed MOUSE again and that time it worked. I don't know what that was all about, but then I ran NES and did some Choplifter action and everything seemed fine... video, audio, joystick controls, etc.

One thing I wasn't clear about from reading this thread was that Ctrl-Q seems to be the "get me back to the prompt" shortcut, but when I saw that in some of the other screens like the joystick calibration, I realized that seems to be common. I don't know if that works across all of the different emulators? If so that might be worth adding to the basic instructions? Just a suggestion since I was stumbling around a bit there at first. :)

I was reading up on the ROMxe trying to figure out how to "romify" the launching program. I thought that'd be a nice option so I could do that straight from the ROMxe boot routine, but that's more of a "nice to have". I'm somewhat new to all of the "new" retro Apple II stuff although back in my teen years in the 80's I was all about the Apple ecosystem and knew my way around really well. So all of that knowledge is a little dusty still, but I might see if the Romify instructions make any sense and give that a shot.

Thanks for the reply. Since it started working again after that initial attempt, I'll continue to check it over the next few days to see if the problem comes back up.

If so, I'll simplify by removing anything that it doesn't need. I have the original ROM chips, so I could swap those out for the ROMxe but they're not the "enhanced" ROMs. That probably won't matter for this card though since it's only using the Apple to launch the ESP32 interface and intercept keyboard, mouse and joystick. So it probably doesn't need anything from the enhanced ROMs or a 65C02 ?

I also have another Apple IIe that I'm in the process of repairing (a few broken/missing keys that are currently being shipped to replace those). It's also unenhanced but it might be a good way to test it out and see if it's a computer specific issue or not.

Both of my Apple II's are eBay purchases that worked, but needed some cleaning, and the power supply on one of them definitely had to be recapped (the one I'm using now looks like it already had a recap done). But both passed all their memory tests thankfully so I'm pretty sure the RAM is okay on them.

It's good to know that jeffmazur was also using a ROMx on his system and I guess it was working okay? That was my concern, that maybe that was somehow causing an issue, and in my case I also swapped out the Video ROM from them as well (since it was an un-enhanced system, I at least would have had to get the enhanced video ROM, and figured I may as well get the ROMxe video ROM as long as I was swapping chips).

I'll also keep in mind the things you mentioned about the types of crashes and recovery. Hopefully if this keeps happening I'll have more feedback to help narrow down where the problem is. :)

Well, I don't know what the issues were that I was having at first. I didn't change anything except I did reverse the speaker wires since at first I thought maybe that had something to do with it.

With the ROMXe installed, I think that changes how it beeps when starting up and I wasn't 100% sure I was hearing the normal Apple II beep as well as the one that the Esp32 is supposed to add. I'm still not sure. :)

Anyway, everything has been working fine for the past couple days. I started it up again this morning to try it out and I was testing a TG16 game of Super Mario Bros which was going fine right up until my rebuilt joystick broke a button (plastic around the button broke off... :) I'm trying to superglue it back together right now)

I'll keep testing it out. By the way, I was enjoying the sample list of Internet radio stations... I was listening to the 70's station and was amused to hear German commercials between songs. And the inclusion of an Adrian's Digital Basement clip in the videos was fun (his channel is how I heard about this project, and honestly it's also what got me back into some vintage computers like the ones I used in high school).

I was still having issues with the Mac emulation where the cursor was drifting, but you're right, it's because of a drift in the joystick. If I pushed the joystick button a couple times (toggling keyboard?) or just moved the cursor with the joystick, the drift would stop, but then if I tried the mouse again the drift would pick up. I think the joystick was calibrated okay using the JOYSTICK option. I had it centered and from that screen, it wasn't drifting around. I guess as long as I have the joystick open to fix that button, I'll get some deoxit into the potentiometers just to see if that helps. I did that when I first got it since it was in rough shape and it has been performing well right up until the button broke, but it may have got a little "scratchy" again since my initial cleaning.

Thanks again for the troubleshooting tips.

jeffmazur wrote:

I'm also having fun with the new board. Seems like there is a great potential to expand its features as well.

 

I did create a ROM image of the setup program and added it to my ROMX so I can instantly start up the board on power up.

Is there any chance you could share your ROMX image? I was going to try creating one myself but if you had something going, that would be a timesaver since I haven't tried to romify anything with it... wasn't exactly sure from the instructions how to do it. I figured out where the binary loads and does the initial jump but then I tabled any further work on it 'til later. It's pretty small (1270 bytes I think?) so I thought about just doing a DOS 3.3 version with a 12K template, but I couldn't find the 12K template anywhere. All I found was the 32K one in the ROMX zip file... maybe the 12K is in the one for the II/II+.

I'm probably just thinking it's more complicated than it sounds. :)

MPBApple wrote:

Is there any chance you could share your ROMX image?

I did make an image for the ROMXe to auto startup the ESP32 Softcard:

ESP32.NTSC_.dsk_.zip

Making this work on a ROMX for the Apple II/II+ is a little more complicated. But we have a new board coming out soon that would make this possible.

Thanks for that, I'll definitely give it a try.

I was trying out a few more interesting features of the card today, like the FTPSERVER and the internet radio stations.

Some feedback for CVT, and maybe this was something I was doing wrong, but the FTP server was connecting okay with anonymous, but when I tried to set it up for a user pass (like "FTPSERVER user password") I was getting connection errors. I used WinSCP as well as trying Windows Explorer to map with the user/pass, and dusted off the Putty FTP (psftp.exe) but I'd just errors. I'll have to look at the server responses more... i could see the banner info while connecting but I think it was giving a 503.

Anyway... Anonymous did work. Another issue I had was that I was trying to copy back over the 2 Mac disk images because I must have done something with it when fiddling with the joystick creeping... Anyway, disk 2 copied back over okay, just 1440KB, but disk 1 would get partway through (sometimes 20%, sometimes 30%, I think as much as 40%) but then error out. WinSCP was guessing it was a "disk full" error but the sdcard still has lots of room. I was just trying to avoid opening up the case and swapping the card into my reader, but I can do that in this case.

Updating other files like the audiostreams.txt is fine... great in fact. I was testing various streaming stations, and the ability to quickly copy the updated file back over was great. If I had to pop that card out/in for little updates like that, it'd be a pain, so that FTP server is awesome.

As far as the LISTEN feature, it works for some stations, but other stations I was testing had a lot of dropouts. I don't know if it's because some stations were streaming 192Kbps ? Is that too much for it, or should it be able to handle that okay?

I also wasn't quite sure if I should be including the http:// or https:// handler in front of the URL, but it seems to figure it out if I leave those out of the URL so that's what I've been doing.

Most of my testing was just getting the correct URL to use... using VLC to test out the stream URL ahead of time is helpful.

Here's one station that was giving me some dropout issues:

Vintage Broadcast, s9.myradiostream.com/8724/;?type=mp3&nocache=1705031670?0.06009898341105413

A curious thing about that URL... it's actually listed as /:8724/ so that colon is part of the URL path, but I could see that when LISTEN opened it, it was parsing that as the *port* to connect to, not as part of the URI path so it was failing. I could get around that by URL encoding the colon to %3A which worked, but eventually I discovered that that station will stream fine without the colon at all. I wonder if they originally actually did have it on that port but changed it, and that # is just included in the path for legacy reasons. Whatever... I figured it out.

So... the FTP user/pass, which maybe I'm just doing something wrong? And how it had issues uploading large files to it...  I assume that's all part of an ESP32 library, the ftp server components, so hopefully that's something with some fixes to explore.

The audio streaming and dropouts... when streaming with VLC on my laptop it's fine so I knew the stream itself was okay, but the LISTEN feature was dropping out. It seems like the buffer size should be okay to handle network delays, but maybe it needs more buffer? I'm just guessing. I think my wifi connection is good. I realize that there's VERY little antenna strength on this, but my hotspot is just out in the hallway from my office and I think it was showing about -52 dbm which seems okay. And it was only some streams having issues so I was guessing it had to do with the streaming bitrate.

If needed I can stick to streams with lower bitrates like 128k or below... After all, I'm not going for super hi fi on this and the tinny built in speaker. I thought it'd be fun to listen to retro radio on my retro PC, and I can probably find something with a more suitable "lo fi" 32Kb stream. :)

I am pleased as punch that the initial problems I had with getting the card to go into the CLI haven't returned. I'm still not sure what that was all about but it's been going great the past few days which is great. 2 thumbs up from me.

Thanks for checking on those things. I was trying some other streaming URLs today (more of the retro/vintage radio) and some were okay, some still had the buffering/slowness issues.

Let me work on a list of the ones that are okay or have issues and that way you'll have a few different ones to compare (I think I also lost track of which ones were okay or not by this point, LOL)

I kept retrying the FTP copy of that large Mac disk image and at some point it finally uploaded okay... took a dozen tries but it got there. :)

Anyway, I know I've said it before but I'll say it again, I really appreciate the work you've done on this. It's such a cool project... I thought it was fun enough just putting together a retro PC but then adding this to it just expands the types of retro activity I can use it for.

That's great progress on figuring out the FTP.

I thought about getting some kind of micro-SD extension cable. I didn't know if they existed or not (apparently they do)... I wondered if there would be too much signal loss but if it works, that's definitel a good idea for anyone who makes frequent changes. It might be useful for other things too. I see you have one in your Dan ][, and something like that would also be handy for some servers I use that have an internal card slot for the OS (vmware or something). I was working on such a server a while back, testing some small bootable Linux systems, and it was kind of a pain to keep popping the cover off to access the card.

For people in the US who might not have the patience for AliExpress shipping, I saw Amazon has similar items for just a bit more. But if you didn't mind the wait, I've always had good luck so far with my Ali orders.

Here are the test results from my audio streams file. In one case, the "LiSTNR 80s New Wave" station, it works in VLC but when I examine the "m3u8" file it seems to be talking about an MP4a codec so maybe that won't work. No big deal.

For the ones that suffer the "slow stream" and "dropouts", the bitrate is typically higher (over 128Kbps) but even one at 128K was stuttering. Nothing reported on it about the dropouts, but it was definitely cutting out here and there. One thing they all had in common though, maybe just a coincidence, is that the dropouts all come from 48K sample rates. If they have 44.1K sample rates then it seemed to be fine.

The notes in green mean it worked fine for me, yellow means it had the dropouts, and then that blue one which is probably just an unsupported code?

It's worth mentioning that I just pulled a variety of internet stations that seemed interesting and I may or may not keep any or all of them (but the vintage ones are pretty fun, with old radio dramas from the 50s like "Dimension X" episodes of classic sci fi stories). So if they simply can't be supported because of the sample rate or bit rate, that's fine too.

EDIT:  The color highlights I added in the post are NOT appearing when I actually post it. Boo... hopefully it's still understandable with the notes I added about which ones are okay or not. If I didn't say anything about the slow stream/dropouts, that means it played just fine.

Christmas Vinyl HD, icecast.walmradio.com:8000/christmas = slow stream, dropouts possible = channels 2, samplerate 48K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 256K

Classic Vinyl HD, icecast.walmradio.com:8000/classic = slow stream, dropouts possible = channels 2, samplerate 48K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 256K

Contemporary Christian, icecast.walmradio.com:8000/walmn = slow stream, dropouts possible = channels 2, samplerate 48K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 320K

LiSTNR 80s New Wave, wz7liw.scahw.com.au/live/780snewwave_128.stream/playlist.m3u8 = not working (works in VLC though) - may be mp4a codec?

Indiana Dunes Old Time Radio, ais-edge106-live365-dal02.cdnstream.com/a78203 = channels 2, samplerate 44.1K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 128K

New Wave 80s Radio, digitalaudiobroadcasting.net:8004/stream = channels 2, samplerate 44.1K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 128K

Old Time Radio, icecast.walmradio.com:8000/otr = channels 1, samplerate 48K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 64K

Traditional Christian and Classical, icecast.walmradio.com:8000/walm2 = slow stream, dropouts possible = channels 2, samplerate 48K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 256K

Vintage Broadcast, s9.myradiostream.com/8724/?type=mp3 = slow stream, dropouts possible = channels 2, samplerate 44.1K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 192K

Vintage Obscura, radio.vintageobscura.net/stream = no errors shown but it's still stuttery compared to normal on VLC = channels 2, samplerate 48K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 128K

WZQR Gold Big Band, ais-edge102-live365-dal02.cdnstream.com/a21353 = channels 2, samplerate 48K, bits per sample 16, bitrate 128K

The new firmware seems to have fixed that FTP issue like you mentioned. Thanks. The copy of that large Mac disk worked fine. It's not going to win any speed records (I think WinSCP was showing 130-140 Kbps) but it got the job done. And the good news is that I was able to copy over the new firmware file without any problems, so it was small enough to copy okay so I could do the flash.

For the audio streaming, I pulled an old access point out of my stash, placed it directly next to the Apple and gave it a test SSID, and connected to that. In the screenshot I'm attaching, you can see it "MPTest" with a signal strength of -35 dBm compared to -59 dBm for my regular "MPMesh" ssid I was using before. So it's a lot stronger by a lot, but I still get those audio dropouts on the same stations when streaming. I'll attach a photo of that screen too in case the errors or other metadata show anything useful.

Those stations all stream okay on my Windows machine with VLC so I know they were working okay in general. Well, I'm not too worried about it, I'm sure I can find other similar stations that stream at a lower bitrate. I wonder if there are any other ESP32 Softcard users, maybe in the US like me, that could try some of them out just to compare.

Oh, I wondered if there was any attachment points for an external antenna on the ESP32 itself. I haven't opened the Apple case again to see if the ESP32 has the external antenna connection with the option to move a resistor to different pads for internal or external antenna. I've seen some videos on soldering an SMA connector directly to it by scratching off some of the solder mask that covers the internal antenna area, but I think my wifi connection is okay, but I was just curious if there was a cleaner way of doing that, just in case. I've mostly tinkered with things like Raspberry Pi and this is my first ESP32 device so I'm very new to the architecture.

Streaming with dropouts

ESP32 showing SSID signal strength

Thanks for double-checking. I just tried the FTP copy again using that Mac disk 1 and it's much better. I might not have remembered it right, or maybe I saw it when it was first starting up and hadn't made a good average time yet. I checked the copy rate after 15 seconds to get a good rate an it's 231 KB/s (so it would take a little under 6 minutes to copy that file).

By the way, I was checking out some random games just for fun yesterday and saw in the NES selection there's an Angry Birds 3. I tried it just to see what that would look like but all I got was a blank screen. I'm sure it's some modern port of the game which made me curious to see it but it wasn't working for me. I wouldn't be surprised if it's something in that ROM file itself though.

Other games I tried like Arkanoid work great, although with Arkanoid, it seems like maybe I was seeing something similar where the mouse and joystick are both basically usable by the emulator and it was resulting in some weird issues. I could use the mouse or joystick, but it was a little sluggish and sometimes the "paddle" would want to stick all the way left or right (whichever direction I had been going). If I unplug the joystick and just use mouse control its fine, and it might be the same if I just unplugged the mouse and used joystick.

Anyway, I wondered if there might be some option to disable mouse or joystick in the emulators, so it was only using the inputs from one or the other (some games like Arkanoid are better with mouse, I think, and some just work better with a joystick, etc).

I managed to fix my joystick button... it's an old Kraft Premium II joystick and the plastic around the button just broke entirely. I tried superglue but it doesn't hold, so I ended up ordering a pack of 12mm round buttons in various colors... (I used red to replace the primary red button that broke). Had to use my step bit to drill the hole a little larger (from square to round), soldered the new one in and it works great. Better than the original, I think. Plus, it usese a backing nut to hold it in, instead of some plastic clips that might break again, so I think it'll be more durable. I was tempted to go ahead and replace the other button while I was at it but I'll save that for another day.

All of that has nothing to do with the Esp32 Softcard, LOL... but I figure someone googling about that joystick and replacing a button might appreciate the extra info. I couldn't find a direct replacement anywhere, at least not where I was sure it would fit without some hole size modifications anyway, so I just went with the good old Amazon option. $10 USD for a pack of 10 buttons with pre-wired leads... 2 each in 5 different colors. 12mm hole size (on my step bit the 5/8" marking was perfect) since the original square/rectangular hole was about 12mm x 11mm.  I also used the opportunity to get a little Deoxit into the pots for the controls, although they were pretty stable already, and made a slight tweak of the rotation so I could center them a little better in the joystick test screen.