Soon after the introduction of the Raspberry Pi Pico in 2021 Glenn Jones and I started to experiment with directly connecting it to the Apple II slot bus. In 2022 I published a working Pico firmware on GitHub. Based on that we started to implement the A2retroNET project which I presented at KanasFest 2023 (https://youtu.be/ryiH8t4yIuw).
In the meanwhile Ralle Palaveev created his own A2Pico hardware for the firmware I had published before. In contrast to the hardware I presented on KansasFest, A2Pico consists completely of through-hole components which allow for very easy DIY assembly. However, at that point my Pico firmware relied on the behavior of components only available as SMD fine-pitch packages. Therefore A2Pico had some functional limitations.
Considering the next steps after presenting the prototype at KansasFest I decided that my firmware should be accessible to the DIY community so I teamed up with Ralle to modify both hardware and firmware to enable full functionlity with through-hole components.
Additionally I wanted to establish a software library that avoids duplication of low level code into the different firmware projects that all share the same hardware. The name A2Pico is now used for both the common hardware and the common software.
Check it out on GitHub and this Hackaday article as well as the video below:
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