Twilight_Rodent
Well-known member
Well it is not in production yet. But it does work, and will buy one when offered.
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Blue Tooth, for the Apple II
- Thread starter Twilight_Rodent
- Start date
Quadraman
Well-known member
A lot of the time projects like this never go into production. It is hard for a lone hobbyist making them by hand to crank them out in quantites sufficient for sale to the public. They need a backer with money and mass production equipment. Since the Apple II platform is so old, I doubt there would be anyone that would offer to put it into production because the investment would likely never pay off. If he did decide to start making them available to the public, they would likely cost hundreds of dollars for all the time that goes into making each one and they usually do this as a side thing, so they won't be devoting all their time to it which means long waiting lists until he gets sick of making them and quits.
MultiFinder
Well-known member
Bah, when has THAT ever produced anything good?Unless they get some friends together in their garage to start making small batches of the things...
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II2II
Well-known member
Wow. I'm not surprised that it took 3 years to design and test because that is quite the collection of features. Don't know if I'd want it though since it sounds a bit dodgy. Though I like the idea of virtual floppies in RAM. A card with just that and a battery backup of the RAM would be pretty cool.
luddite
Host of RetroChallenge
I wouldn't write it off just yet... the Uthernet and CFFA cards both managed to sustain 3 production runs and as far as I know neither one had any outside backing. Of course the market for *new* Apple II peripherals is probably in the low hundreds, so getting anywhere near mass production would probably be a bad idea.
Time will tell...
MultiFinder
Well-known member
:-xUm, 1976?
lol
II2II
Well-known member
Very true. The 68k MLA forums are far from the hotspot of Apple II activity. To my knowledge, you would find that on usenet (though things may have changed over the past few years). And something like that may be a relatively hot seller since the remaining Apple II users are rather devoted. And you can see that in a variety of ways.
They seem to be more interested in running real hardware than many other vintage computing enthusiasts. Yes, they have their emulators and yes a few people only use emulators. But when I contrast Apple II users to (say) Amiga users, the former seems to like the hardware and the latter usually wants to get their old software running under WinUAE. (Which is ironic, because the Apple II is easy to emulate while the Amiga is supposed to be hard to emulate.)
I always hear Apple II users talking about "real" projects. There are tonnes of people writing programs either on or for the Apple II. You see a bit of that in the Macintosh world, like the game (Wings of Fury?) that was discussed a couple of weeks back, but not too much. In Apple II land, I see everything from fantastic games to utilities to link the Apple II to other machines to emulators in progress. Then there is hardware. There are several notable hardware projects on the Apple II, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone building a card for the Macintosh as a hobby.
And there are buyers too. There are at least two online stores that are dedicated to selling Apple II merchandise. These aren't people that sell old Apple II gear along with other stuff. These aren't people who sell stuff off of swap-lists, or forums, or eBay. These are dedicated hobbyists serving other dedicated hobbyists. (Actually, I see this in the Amiga world too. Why don't 68k Mac enthusiasts have the same.)
I've heard complaints that the Apple II community isn't as active as some. I think that can't be further from the truth. I think that they are simply showing their dedication by sticking to the original stuff and building upon the original stuff, rather than making it the sort of place that retro-gamers goto to pirate disk images for their emulator.
So can the engineer of this project sell some cards. You bet.
I just think that is is a bit dodgy, but that may be because he described the design process while most companies keep that sort of thing under wraps. After all, if the iMac design process looked like upchucked oatmeal it would kinda ruin Apple's reputation.
Quadraman
Well-known member
I think the reason Apple II devotees are so hardcore is because the Apple II was always more of a programmers machine than other 8 bit machines of the day. Most of the competing platforms weren't much more than video game systems with a keyboard. The Apple II also always had much more serious tools for programmers than other systems.
II2II
Well-known member
I don't know if the Apple II world had more hard core programmers. Keep in mind that Amiga had the demoscene, the PC had those lovely Borland compilers (look at how many shareware programs there are with BGI files, and you will have a good idea of which compiler they used), and if you return to the 8-bit era there were plenty of programming books for the Commodore 64 and other 8-bit micros.
It's kinda funny though, when I look at my library I notice that most of my "serious" programming books are for the Apple II while the "fun" programming books (games, problem solving, or directed at kids) are for the other platforms (particularly the C=64). So if my library is indicative of what was really happening, there was definitely a huge difference between who was doing the programming on different platforms.
It's kinda funny though, when I look at my library I notice that most of my "serious" programming books are for the Apple II while the "fun" programming books (games, problem solving, or directed at kids) are for the other platforms (particularly the C=64). So if my library is indicative of what was really happening, there was definitely a huge difference between who was doing the programming on different platforms.
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