Apple II VGA card
Apple II VGA card with Raspberry Pi Pico
This VGA interface card for the Apple II Series computers allows you to connect a VGA connector to your Apple and gives you a crisp RGB output for a greatly improved picture quality.
This is accomplished by snooping the 6502 bus and creating a shadow copy of the video memory within a Raspberry Pi Pico, then processing the raw video memory contents to output a “perfect” signal.
PCB is ENIG with gold plated fingers.
This is a open source project by Mark Aikens. All design material including schematics and source code is available on his github page.
The default firmware loaded on the cardw will be for the Apple IIe and at is currently at V1.3.0
See the github page for instructions on upgrading the firmware or changing it for the Apple II Plus.
Features:
- Generates a 640×480@60 VGA signal with 3 bits per color channel using resistor DACs
- Text mode (monochrome)
- Lo-res mode with no color fringing between the chunky pixels
- Hi-res mode with simulated NTSC artifact color
- Mixed lo-res and hi-res modes with monochrome text and no color fringing
- Apple IIe video modes: 80-column text, double-lores, & double-hires
- Soft-monochrome mode to force display as if on a monochrome monitor
- Some Video-7 RGB card extended graphical modes are implemented
- Compatibility with Videx VideoTerm modes on Apple II+
Includes:
– VGA Card
– VGA Connector
– DB8 ribbon cable to connect VGA Connector to PCB
The connector is a VGA (DB15) connector. If you want to connect this to HDMI you will need a VGA to HDMI adapter (Not supplied)
I have tested these cards on my Apple IIe and the picture is crystal clear.
Make sure you are inserting the card with the correct orienatation. The ribbon cable can only plug one way as it has key slots.
