APPLE2Idiot Expansion Card Allows Your Apple II (Kind Of) Accessibility The World-wide-web

[Nathanial Hendler]’s Apple2Fool enlargement card for the Apple II family members of computer systems is a nifty combine of fashionable and vintage, and supplies a intelligent suggests of permitting the host personal computer to (indirectly) obtain the web in excess of WiFi while maintaining factors uncomplicated from the host computer’s standpoint.

It does this by embedding an ESP32 module and a dual-port RAM chip onto an growth card. The Apple2Fool, when installed into a host machine, provides as a memory area which the host equipment can obtain. The ESP32 then normally takes care of all the WiFi communications and jobs requiring web access, and the host pc directs these jobs (and reads their output) by using PEEK and POKE commands.

This signifies that there are two items of software for any offered activity: one operating on the ESP32 undertaking the precise function, and just one running on the Apple II that communicates with the ESP32 on the card by reading and composing to memory. It’s a straightforward program, and one particular that [Nathanial] thinks will work really very well for certain responsibilities.

Instance courses include things like things like scanning and picking out a WiFi community, fetching weather info, and sending a concept to Slack. Generating new apps does imply acquiring to publish software on two finishes, but the simplicity of the program also usually means versatility, mainly because just about anything the ESP32 does can have its complexity abstracted away by the time its info is presented to the host device. Not that the Apple II is incapable of dealing with the modern day net extra straight we’ve witnessed a primary Apple II web server penned in Primary.