MacFly's blog

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Video cards for the Apple II based on the PICO microcontroller are popular for a while now. They are cheap, consume very little power, and fit on a simple Apple II slot card. And they connect Apple IIs to modern displays. However, digital displays have conquered the world: their analog predecessors long since became retro devices themselves. Nowadays even analog VGA inputs are becoming rare. Which leads to the question: couldn't we make a PICO-based graphics card for the Apple II with a digital output instead? Use HDMI to replace the VGA connector? No more analog signal conversion required?

Spoiler: yes, we can! :)

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What does an Apple II VGA Card, a Z80-CPM SoftCard and an USB-Apple II Mouse Interface Card have in common? Well, almost everything. All three are the same card. Same hardware. Just differing software. The magic of software-defined hardware. It can emulate many things. It just depends on software.

I started a project to add USB support to the Apple II - extending the PICO-based Apple2 VGA cards. The cards are based on excellent work by Mark Aikens, David Kuder and others. The hardware is using the surprisingly powerful and flexible PICO microcontroller. The first and most obvious application of the A2USB project is a complete Apple II Mouse Interface Card emulation, supporting a USB mouse.