Finally, the first real progress on the Yellowstone disk controller since last summer! Sometimes an error is a good thing. It doesn’t look like much yet, but this error demonstrates that the Yellowstone card is correctly decoding address references to…
Where are all the cheap and simple third-party JTAG programmers? My work on the Yellowstone disk controller was sidetracked by issues with the Lattice-clone JTAG programmer, and discussion about ways that future Yellowstone customers might do JTAG programming. Eventually I…
Over the decades, I’ve pared my collection of books down to just four shelves – only about 100 volumes from a lifetime of reading and studying. Because who needs physical books in an age where everything is available online? The…
After a month of inactivity, I finally returned to my unfinished Yellowstone disk controller project to investigate the JTAG programming problems. Yellowstone is an FPGA-based disk controller card for the Apple II family, that aims to emulate a Liron disk…
This week brought some fascinating news for CPU nerds: the revelation of security vulnerabilities in the basic hardware architecture of many modern processors. The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affect virtually all modern computers, according to a sensationalist headline at The…
Apple II disk controller cards are weird, there are a crazy number of different types, and many are rare and expensive. Can an FPGA-based solution save the day for retro collectors? You bet! Nearly all the existing disk controllers connect…
Like a million other people on the Internet, I’ve been experimenting with home weather logging. I roll my eyes at the phrase “Internet of Things”, but it’s hard to deny the potential of cheap networked sensors and switches, and a…
Who needs a logic analyzer? You do! If you enjoy working with electronics, a good logic analyzer is an indispensable tool. It lets you examine exactly what’s happening with your data signals, so you can troubleshoot problems quickly or reverse-engineer…
Remember the Pippin, Apple’s ill-fated attempt to enter the video game market? The hardware was effectively a modified Macintosh, running a customized version of System 7.5. The Pippin lacks any standard floppy disk connector (internal or external), but it does…
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