Anthony Ortiz
2017-07-20 16:00:44 UTC
I was dreaming about how nice it would be to have a graphical web-browser on an Apple II, but that would require a decent enough resolution to be able to display it, at the very minimum VGA. Second-Sight produced something like this but it never caught on and from what I've read the results weren't that great and it had issues; if someone has anything to add regarding Second-Sight I am all ears as I am very much interested in how it works and whether it was a quality product. Anyway, I was dreaming about how nice a VGA card for the Apple II would be, but the processor on the Apple II is not fast enough to make this a pleasant experience; no way would you be able to run, say, Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. That had me thinking that it would be nice to have an accelerator card for the Apple II, something similar to the TransWarp but faster since multi-media applications (such as a web-browser) are pretty demanding; perhaps something around 100mhz. So I'm dreaming of a 100mhz accelerator card for the II, but all that speed would be useless if it has to access RAM and the video card at 1mhz. That got me thinking that perhaps the accelerator can host its own RAM, completely replacing the II's motherboard RAM, so that full speed can be achieved at all times except video access which is still a problem. That got me dreaming about an external bus that can connect these modern high-speed peripheral cards (Accelerator, VGA card, perhaps an updated Uthernet card, etc...) together similar to the way an SLI cable connects GeForce cards together for SLI. So I'm dreaming about how these modern cards can plug into the Apple II slots for power and utilize the external SLI-Style bus for communicating with each other at high speed when I realize that the 8-bit CPU (or 16 65C816) may be insufficient for our modern sensibilities, so now I'm dreaming of a 32-bit 65C832...