I remember the first time I had my first prototype of what will become the SmartDisk II loading the NIB image of BoulderDash II on my Apple II.
The first prototype was made on a very poor quality breadboard with a STM32 Bluepill, with a lot of ICs. The process to load NIB image was not really accurate, but I was so proud of having at least something working.
This was the beginning of my journey to design and build an accurate Apple II Disk Emulator. I reached out to the Applefritter community for help on this project, and I received more than what I was hopping. This was a few month of long hardworking and debugging session with a lot of up and down along this way.
The purpose of this project was really a personal goal to experiment, learn, understand, and build. My approach from the beginning was to give back what I have collected and learnt to the community and this is why this project is before everything open-source.
This was the second version of the SmartDisk II using 74LSXX (way too many 😉
You can find here my progresses on Applefritter week after week with all the issues and dead end I faced along my journey: https://www.applefritter.com/content/apple-ii-disk-emulator-using-stm32
This project is not over, I continue to improve and add new features to the firmware.
Here is the version 6 of the SmartDisk II Board with 3D printed case
The GitHub repository can be found here :https://github.com/vibr77/AppleIIDiskIIStm32F411
Vincent