Apple2Idiot Hardware - useful with Oric?

This is the right place to discuss on how to implement hardware vsync, adding a VIA or AY chipset, puting multiple roms, or how to design a new flash expansion card.
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ibisum
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Apple2Idiot Hardware - useful with Oric?

Post by ibisum »

This interesting bit of hardware, designed for the Apple II, nevertheless looks like something we could use with the Oric easily enough:

https://github.com/equant/apple2idiot

What do you guys think?
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Dbug
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Re: Apple2Idiot Hardware - useful with Oric?

Post by Dbug »

Plenty of things can be done with ESP32, plenty of input/output pins, basically like an Arduino on steroids.

I guess technically it's not very different from one the 8bit dude did with the 8bit hub, an expansion board that gives internet access, mouse, joysticks.

Technically, if such a card was on the expansion bus (instead of parallel port), it would be probably much faster, but we know how the expansion bus of the Oric is, and the device itself would be useless without a floppy storage (real or sd card based), so that has to be compatible as well, and if we want things like speech synthesizer, etc... it needs proper address decoding.

I wonder if it would make sense to standardize some expansion port system, like what the guy who made the MEA8000 interface did:
image_2022-05-10_133225470.png
This thing allows to connect the Oric to the board, the board to a microdisc or cumulus, and you can plug the speech synthesizer on it, it comes with an external 5v PSU connector as well.
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ibisum
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Re: Apple2Idiot Hardware - useful with Oric?

Post by ibisum »

Holy molies, that thing looks amazing. Where did you learn about it DBug?
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Re: Apple2Idiot Hardware - useful with Oric?

Post by Dbug »

ibisum wrote: Sun May 15, 2022 9:56 am Holy molies, that thing looks amazing. Where did you learn about it DBug?
That was on the French forum system-cfg:
https://forum.system-cfg.com/viewtopic. ... 2298fa6ce1

Yesterday I posted the link of all the schematics and photos on our SVN repository as well (with authorization from the author):
https://forum.defence-force.org/viewtop ... 005#p27005
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