LinApple – an Apple II emulator for Linux / Raspberry Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi #Apple #VintageComputing #Emulation @Raspberry_Pi
LinApple is an Apple II (2 // ][ etc.) is cross-platform emulator by beotiger.
I’ve been exploring the Internet looking for decent working emulator of my favorite 8-bit computer – Apple][ – for my Linux desktop.
But I could not find the one! I could not believe it – Linux is the leading powerful operation system, and nowadays there is NO ONE working emulator for the greatest computer of the past – the Apple][. But the truth is this:
Yes, I know, there is KEGS -brilliant piece of code written by Kent Dickey for current most spread-wide OSes, including Linux. But KEGS is emulator of Apple2GS computers, which is although compatible is not as a real Apple][, agree.
There is also XAPPLE, but it is obsolete and does not want to run on my modern Linux desktop. There are few others, including YAE – Yet Another Apple2 Emulator, but they also are obsolete and not usable, or expecting rather strange things.
So, what you think I had to do? Yes, to write my own emulator, which could be run easily on my modern Linux desktop.
AppleWin (https://github.com/AppleWin) is almost perfect, but it has one disadvantage – it can not be runned on Linux!
So, instead of inventing a wheel, I decided to port AppleWin to Linux, using SDL library (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and changing all Windows API functions to their POSIX equivalents.
In a couple of weeks of debugging and testing emulator became what we can see it now – a real working powerful emulator of Apple][ series computers under Linux, working right out of the box! To be more precise, it is not just for Linux, but for any POSIX-compliant OS which supports SDL library.
What are the differences between the forked version of Mark Ormond and original LinApple – Apple II emulator for Linux? You can build it for Raspberry Pi! Very nice.
See the LinApple website which includes screenshots, download, and support.
Once you have your emulator working, check out the Internet Archive for their software libraries – they have been imaging thousands of disks.