Articles by Big Mess o' Wires

If you’ve ever used an Apple II computer, then you’ll remember the click-clack-whack sounds of a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. The internal stepper motor moves between tracks on the disk, and every step makes an audible sound. When the computer first boots, it makes an unforgettable buzzing sound as

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A few days back, a discussion on the Apple II Facebook group asked about large format Floppy Emu displays for people with vision difficulties. Here’s a 2.42 inch OLED that’s a simple drop-in replacement for the OLED in Floppy Emu Model C. With more than 3x the screen area

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Vote for your preferred Floppy Emu daisy chain design option! I’ve been working on this concept for several weeks, and wrote about it here, here, here, and here. I’ve now realized there are two different paths I could follow, with different feature sets and likely costs. For those who are

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I’m still working away on the daisy chain adapter concept for Floppy Emu, and I’ve prototyped something that mostly works. It’s a real mess on the breadboard. There’s an AVR microcontroller in there somewhere, plus some open drain buffers, some NAND gates… I think I also saw an engine

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I’m continuing work on the daisy chain adapter concept for Floppy Emu, and I’ve run into a problem. There’s a pulldown resistor on the Floppy Emu board that’s too weak (resistor value is too large) to reliably pull the voltage all the way down to the logic low threshold. This

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Today I’m thrilled to announce the newest member of BMOW’s Floppy Emu disk emulator family – the Model C. Floppy Emu is a floppy and hard disk emulator for classic Apple II, Macintosh, and Lisa computers. The new Model C introduces an eye-catching 1.3-inch 128×64 OLED display, with crisp

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I often obsess over little details of my circuit designs, and the daisy-chain adapter for Floppy Emu is no exception. The design needs a small CPLD for the daisy-chaining logic, and for various reasons I have narrowed the choices to the Lattice ispMACH LC4032ZE and LC4032V. These are both

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Some Apple II computers can daisy-chain disk drives: connect multiple disks, one after another in a single chain. I’m exploring options for the BMOW Floppy Emu disk emulator to support daisy-chaining more flexibly than it does now. I’d love your thoughts on whether you’d find this personally useful –

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All good things must come to an end, and today it’s the end of the Macintosh ROM-inator II SIMM and SIMM programmer. The DIY ROM-inator I kit was discontinued a year ago, and now the ROM-inator II is suffering the same fate. I hate to see it go, but

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Happy birthday and merry Christmas, Apple II collectors! I’ve decided to make a gift of my design for an FPGA-based disk controller card, and release it under a Creative Commons – BY-SA license. This means anyone else is welcome to use it, modify it, build it, or sell it.

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