On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 4:08 PM Bill Degnan via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > But...because the apple I is so valuable people have been motivated to > produce really nice replica motherboards. The replicas give many the > chance to experience the Apple I at a reasonable price
I have a bare replica PCB. It's proving difficult to stuff without spending a wad. > It's fun to find original parts and sockets to try to get > a replica as close as possible to an original. You can do that for less than buying an original but it's still $$$ in part because of the rarity of the oddball shift registers, etc., and in part because of the demand for specific package types and date codes to achieve the closest match to an original. Just the ICs alone are hundreds of dollars, the large caps are tens of dollars and even that exact heat sink isn't exactly cheap. My classic interests are wide and varied (as demonstrated by what I bring to VCF) and totally encompass all sorts of 6502 systems. The specific interest the Apple 1 has for me is how screwy the video implementation is (cheap in its time but an evolutionary dead end) and how much it can do with 256 bytes of ROM and 8K of RAM. I would like to be able to build up my board just to watch it run, but outside of that, a non-exact replica (typically using a modern microcontroller to implement the stages of shift registers) still gets the job done for hacking raw 6502 code. I certainly believe in running old systems (I use machines from the 60s and 70s all the time) but in the case of a computer that costs more than my house, I'd probably lock it up in a vault and only take it out for special occasions too. -ethan
