Understanding the Apple IIJames Fielding Sather
Understanding the Apple II
by James Fielding Sather · first published 1983
7mentions
3recommended by
7HN commenters
2023–2026first – last mentioned
43% recommend57% neutral
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This, and "Understanding the Apple II" by Jim Sather are two of my favorite books. It's a lot of fun to open up my Apple 2 (it's a clone but the motherboard is 99% identical), and imagine all the different ICs doing their specific tasks,…
on “The Apple II Circuit Description” ↗…to the original hardware design and in many cases, you can directly translate Sather's logic diagrams to Verilog code. BTW, Sather's book has recently been reissued: https://www.callapple.org/books-3/understanding-the-apple-ii...
on “Open Source FPGA Expansion Card for the Apple II” ↗For Apple-II specific info, consider The Assembly Lines book -- https://archive.org/details/AssemblyLinesCompleteWagner Understanding the Apple IIe -- https://archive.org/details/understandingapp0000sath Understanding the Apple II -- https://archive.org/details/understanding_the_apple_ii
on “Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II” ↗…impractical and didn't work on every Apple II+. IIRC peripheral cards loading the bus could cause it not to function and for instance some clones also didn't work. It was fully documented in Jim Sather's Understanding the Apple II where it described the technique and even gave examples. After reading that as a kid I experimented with it but I never felt like I would use it because it was so awkward to incorporate into a real game…
on “Apple II Vapor Lock and the Floating Bus” ↗FWIW, while this is a reasonably good book (though stay away from the Disk section, IIRC it completely misunderstands the way the Apple encoding works), consensus is that "Understanding the Apple II", by Jim Sather, is the clearly best work on the subject: https://archive.org/details/understanding_the_apple_ii
on “The Apple II Circuit Description” ↗Is the Apple II Reference Manual good for that ? Or anything specific to the Apple II, like "What's Where in the Apple" or "Understanding the Apple II" ?
on “Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II” ↗As mentioned in the link above, Assembly Lines is still in print as a paper book (maybe it's print on demand, but it's a hardcover). I just noticed that Understanding the Apple IIe also got a re-issue from Call-A.P.P.L.E. in 2024 (print edition from Lulu) - https://www.callapple.org/books-3/understanding-the-apple-ii... .
on “Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II” ↗