Apple IIe

software / status: active

This one is a whole machine rather than a board I designed, so it sits a bit sideways in this notebook. There’s been very little refurb work on it. Most of the hours have gone into software: booting things, moving disk images over serial with ADTPro, and writing 6502 in Merlin on the machine itself. I cross-assemble on the Mac sometimes, but it’s more fun to write it in Merlin. The Byte Hamr card lives in this machine, and most of the hardware experimenting happened over on that project.

Current state

As of 2026-10-10: Machine works. Merlin is where the day-to-day 6502 gets written. A replacement controller for the UniDisk 3.5 drives is in progress on its own project.

Hardware

Apple IIe, 128K.
A2DVI board for HDMI out. The same signal feeds a USB capture stick on the Mac, which is how the screenshots on these pages get taken.
Serial card, with ADTPro on the Mac side for moving disk images back and forth.
Byte Hamr FPGA card in a slot. That project page covers that side.
UniDisk 3.5 (A2M2053) for 800K disks. Two more have dead controller boards, which is what the UniDisk 3.5 controller project is about.

Software

I write 6502 in Merlin on the machine. Cross-assembling on the Mac is for when I need the turnaround, and the results come over serial. Everything here is Merlin32 6502 unless it says otherwise. Sources live in the project_byte_hamr repo under software/.

Byte Hamr

Needs the card in the slot.

FARM. Farm and market game. The //e draws a 20x20 plot grid in lo-res with a text HUD and takes input. The world lives in SDRAM bank 32 and is owned by FARMTASK, a skill running on the card’s soft 6502. WORKTASK in bank 33 handles the workshop and crafting. software/SDM/FARM.S
MVERSE / GRVERSE. Conway multiverse. Eight universes get stepped by LIFE8 skills on the coprocessor, and the //e blits one of them to double hi-res at 560x192, or lo-res at 40x48 in the GR build. software/SDM/MVERSE.S, GRVERSE.S
A8. One-program 8008 environment on the //e: 80-column editor with the ASM8 core built in. Ctrl-A assembles, Ctrl-G streams the object to the 8008 card and drops into its TTY. Shipped 2026-07-08. software/B8008/A8.S
ASM8. Native Intel 8008 assembler. Reads a ProDOS text file, writes a BIN with the aux type set to the ORG. Shipped 2026-07-08. software/B8008/ASM8.S
B8RUN, B8TERM, B8CMP, B8TEST. 8008 loader, glass TTY into the 8008 monitor, byte-compare for two files, and the card presence and FIFO self-test. software/B8008/
LOGIC. Front end for the Logic Hamr capture gateware. Arms a capture, waits on the trigger, draws 8 channels on hi-res with trigger modes and zoom. software/LOGICHAMR/LOGIC.S
Self-tests. FARMTEST, CONWAYTEST, SDMTEST and the CP* loaders exercise the coprocessor scheduler, the SDRAM banks and the flash save and restore path. These are bring-up tools. software/SDM/

Standalone

STARSHIP, PLANE. Small hi-res sprite and shape demos. software/ASM/
Aztec C 3.2b disk. The eight release floppies merged onto one 800K ProDOS image with a loader in front of the Manx shell. Kept as a tools disk (grep, diff, hd, ved). I’m not writing C for this machine after the 11.9K hello world. See the log.