A project to bring rights-unencumbered App1e II-style retrocomputing to the masses.
Super II Project Home
Classic Game Fest attendees, thanks for visiting!
Got some great feedback about the project and had some amazing interactions. Your feedback is being used to tweak the project... please check back in about a month (late August) for a downloadable SD image. Thank you!
If you weren't able to scan the QR codes, survey links are now posted at left. More great things coming soon!
Is this just another emulator?
No! There are outstanding App1e II emulators available both commercially and as open source that are both mature and well supported. What these projects all have in common, however, is requiring users to obtain a commercial ROM image. While such ROM images are readily available, usage rights fall into a legal gray area. One objective of this project is to provide a solution that doesn't require users to download commercial ROMs.
Another objective is to bring the platform experience to modern hardware. Emulators often impose legacy hardware limitations and prevent extending the simplicity of the computing environment to take advantage of modern hardware. Editing a BASIC program should be possible to do outside of the restrictive screen resolution of legacy hardware. Software stored on disk images should be readable by the host operating system. In short, enjoying the simplicity of the 80s computing experience shouldn't require a deep understanding of the inner workings of one or more emulators. The Super II project aims to bring a cohesive retrocomputing experience to the modern user.
Why?
With the abundance of inexpensive single board computers (SBCs) on the market, e.g. Raspberry Pi4(00) and many others, retrocomputing has never been more affordable or more powerful. There are many projects that provide accurate emulation, but the purpose of this project is to capture the App1e II experience.