Overview

The Appletini ONE is a single peripheral card for the Apple II slot bus. An FPGA, paired with two ARM Cortex-A9 processors running at 766 MHz, watches the bus every cycle and reconstructs, in real time, the machine’s video, memory and peripherals, then presents them through modern connectors: a digital display over HDMI, storage on an SD card, a network jack, and USB for input. Nothing about your Apple //e is modified; the card provides, from one slot, what used to take a stack of separate boards.

Because the emulation is driven by the real bus rather than a software model, the results match the hardware being emulated at the cycle level: timing-sensitive demos, copy protection and raster tricks behave the way they do on the genuine articles.

Compatibility

The card presents itself to software as multiple original cards. If acceleration is enabled, you will see the machine as an Enhanced Apple //e, whether your system is enhanced or not. This card iteration is certified for Apple //e systems, both unenhanced and enhanced, NTSC and PAL.

Support for Apple II/II+ (including EuroPlus) and Apple IIgs is still in testing and is not guaranteed for this iteration of the card.

In the box

Every order is the Appletini ONE card itself. Optional extras, priced separately, can be added to a reservation:

• 12 V power supply
• Mini-HDMI cable
• SD card, preloaded with firmware and the demo disk
• Mini keyboard (USB)

The card ships with current firmware already installed. The demo disk and future firmware updates are free downloads on the Downloads page.

Getting started

With the machine powered off, seat the card in any free slot. It always uses slot 7: either install it in slot 7, or use another slot and leave slot 7 empty of any card. Connect a display to the mini-HDMI port and an SD card if you have one. Power the machine on; the card initialises and mirrors your Apple //e to the HDMI display. From there its on-screen configuration menu controls the rest.

The board carries its own connectors for everything it provides: mini-HDMI out, an Ethernet jack, USB-C, a 3.5 mm audio-out jack, a micro-SD slot, and a DC power input.

Video

A per-cycle renderer reconstructs the Apple //e picture exactly as the machine generates it and outputs it as a clean digital signal over HDMI. Both NTSC and PAL timing are reproduced faithfully, including the color-fringing behaviour software relies on. PAL goes a step further, with extra timing-exact modes that reproduce every video glitch of the real machine; we expect to bring the same to NTSC in a future update.

Super Hi-Res & SHR4

Beyond the standard text, lo-res, hi-res and double-hi-res modes, the card renders Super Hi-Res and the extended SHR4 family, including 3200-color, RGGB, PAL256 and double (interlaced and page-flipped) modes, for artwork that goes well past what stock hardware could show. Interlaced hi-res and double-hi-res (HGRi, DHRi) render with your choice of paged weave or field merge.

Video-7 RGB

The renderer also understands the extended modes of the Video-7 and Chat Mauve RGB cards, including MIX, which puts color and monochrome on the same double-hi-res scanline, so software written for those cards displays as intended.

SuperSprite

A virtual SuperSprite (TMS9918) overlays hardware sprites and its own graphics modes on top of Apple //e video, composited into the same HDMI output.

Text overlay

Software can also draw a crisp VT100- or CP437-style text layer over the picture, in 16 colors with a cursor, straight from a buffer in Apple RAM. The demo disk’s text overlay program shows it; the interface is documented for programmers on the Developers page.

Display effects

The clean digital picture can be dialed back toward a CRT, to taste: scanlines, phosphor blur that softens the image like a CRT spot, a glow halo around bright pixels, bloom, and ghosting that lets bright pixels linger and decay across frames like real phosphor persistence. Each effect is a separate switch in the video menu. Use one, all, or none.

Acceleration & memory

A virtual TransWarp-class accelerator runs the CPU well beyond 1 MHz, up to 33 MHz. Software that depends on exact timing keeps working: a 1 MHz lock and a video-sync mode let code slow to real speed exactly where it must, so raster effects and timing loops stay correct at any warp setting.

Storage keeps pace: SmartPort transfers and Disk II reads are accelerated under warp too, so booting and loading speed up along with the code.

The card adds 8 MB of fast RAM to the machine, plus a separate 32 MB RAM disk for near-instant storage.

Sound

A virtual Phasor (a dual Mockingboard with stereo synthesis and speech) lives in the card and plays through the onboard 3.5 mm analog audio jack, or an optical digital output if you’ve fitted one. There is no audio over HDMI. If you own a real Mockingboard or Phasor, it keeps working alongside the virtual one.

Storage

The card provides storage several ways at once:

• SmartPort hard-disk volumes from the SD card, bootable
• Disk II emulation with true WOZ support, for bit-accurate copy-protected disks as well as DSK/PO/DO images
• A 32 MB RAM disk for fast scratch space

Mount the SD card on your PC or Mac

Connect the card’s orange (top) USB-C port to a computer and start SD Card Remote Mounting from the on-screen menu: the SD card appears on the desktop as an ordinary USB drive, ready to copy disk images and files both ways. It’s a dedicated maintenance mode: the card pauses its other duties while the computer has the disk, then resumes when you eject on the computer and exit. To skip the USB cable, share the SD card over FTP instead.

Networking

A virtual Uthernet II connects your Apple //e to a real network through the onboard RJ45 jack, speaking standard TCP/IP. The bundled demo disk includes a text web browser and an image viewer that streams pictures from the internet straight into Super Hi-Res.

SD card sharing over FTP

The SD card can be shared over FTP: start sharing from the Ethernet tab of the on-screen menu, and any computer on your local network can browse the card, download files and upload new ones, so you can move disk images on and off without ever ejecting the card. Access is limited to your local subnet. While sharing is active the card’s SD and network are dedicated to it; stop sharing and everything resumes where it was.

Printing

A virtual Super Serial Card in slot 1, with a color ImageWriter II behind it, turns printing into files. Print the way you always did (PR#1 in BASIC, or select a Super Serial Card and ImageWriter II in your software) and each page is saved to the SD card as a PNG: US Letter, 144 dpi, in color, with the four-color ribbon faithfully emulated (overlapping strikes even mix their ink).

It runs the real Super Serial Card firmware, so Ctrl-I commands behave exactly as on the genuine card. A form feed completes a page immediately, and a job closes a few seconds after the Apple stops sending, so a partial last page is never lost. The Printing tab of the on-screen menu manages it all, with a printout browser that previews, renames and deletes pages.

Printing is enabled by default, and the virtual Super Serial Card shares slot 1 with the virtual Uthernet II without conflict; printing and Ethernet work at the same time.

Input

Plug a USB-C mouse into the card’s green (bottom) USB-C port and it appears to software as a genuine Apple mouse card, no AppleMouse hardware required. Add a keyboard and other USB devices through any standard USB hub, no special splitter cable needed.

Z80 & 8088 coprocessors

Slot 5 hosts a coprocessor of your choice, selected from the on-screen menu:

• A virtual Applicard puts a Z80 in the slot, running CP/M software at up to 80 MHz, with 2 MB of its own dedicated memory: decades of business and development software, far faster than the original card managed.
• A virtual ALF AD8088 Plus puts a 640 KB 8088 in the slot, enough to boot MS-DOS on your Apple //e.

One coprocessor runs at a time, and physical slot 5 must be free of a real card. The 8088 shares the bus with the accelerator, so it runs with acceleration switched off; software that calls the original ALF PROM’s graphics routines isn’t covered yet.

Configuration

An on-screen configuration menu, shown over HDMI, controls every feature: which peripherals are virtual, acceleration speed, video options, audio, storage mounts and input bindings. Settings are saved to the SD card as profiles, so the card comes back the way you left it.

Firmware updates

The Appletini ONE is fully field-updatable from the SD card. Get the latest FIRMWARE.BIN from the Downloads page (each release lists what changed), then:

1. Save the file to the top level of the SD card, named exactly FIRMWARE.BIN. You can write it like any file on the SD card, even when it's mounted from inside the Apple.
2. Turn the machine off if it is on, and wait 10 seconds.
3. Turn it on again. The screen stays dark for almost a minute while the firmware is installed.
4. Once it is installed, the machine boots. For good measure, do one more power cycle: off, wait 10 seconds, on.

When the update succeeds the card renames the file to FIRMWARE.OK. If it fails, copy a fresh FIRMWARE.BIN onto the card and go through the steps again. The card cannot brick itself, because the Golden Boot always runs first.

Golden Boot

The card’s flash holds two programs. The Golden Boot is a small, permanent updater that lives in a region the SD update path never erases or writes. It runs on every power-on, before the main firmware: it starts the SD card and, if it finds FIRMWARE.BIN at the top level, checks the image, programs it into the firmware slot, reads back every byte to verify it, and only then marks the slot valid and renames the file. Otherwise it simply starts the verified firmware already in the slot.

A failed or interrupted update leaves FIRMWARE.BIN in place and the slot unmarked, so the next power-on tries again. If no valid firmware exists at all, the Golden Boot waits for a new image over the card’s USB serial port instead. Either way, the card comes back.

Updating the Golden Boot

When a release does require it, the procedure needs the frontend from firmware F1.0.1 or later, and works however old the Golden Boot already on the card is:

1. Install that release’s FIRMWARE.BIN as above, boot it, and confirm the frontend is F1.0.1 or later.
2. Copy the matching BOOT.BIN from the same release to the top level of the SD card.
3. Stop USB SD sharing and FTP SD sharing if either is active.
4. Connect the card’s orange (top) USB-C port to a computer and open its control serial port at 921600 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, no flow control. If no serial ports appear, you may need to install the Silicon Labs USB-to-UART bridge drivers.
5. There are two serial ports, the debug port and the control port; the control port is generally the higher-numbered one. Type ? and you should see a list of commands. If you see nothing, try the other serial port.
6. Enter :selfupdate and press Enter.
7. Keep the card powered until all automatic reboots finish and the normal frontend starts again.

The procedure is built to fail safe. The frontend verifies BOOT.BIN and the installed recovery firmware before it writes anything; if a check fails first, nothing is changed and the cause is reported on the serial port. It then writes and verifies a backup copy of the Golden Boot, boots through it, and only after that repairs and verifies the primary copy. Do not remove power before the normal frontend returns.

Demo disk

A bootable demo disk shows off what the card can do, including:

• A raster-bar demo that stays locked at any acceleration speed
• A side-by-side 1 MHz-versus-warp speed test
• A Super Hi-Res image viewer
• A text web browser and an internet image viewer over Ethernet
• A VT100-style text overlay drawn over the Apple picture
• An 8088 item that boots MS-DOS 2.0 on the virtual AD8088 and runs an animated cube demo

It’s a free download on the Downloads page, and comes preloaded on the SD card if you ordered one. The demo disk is not otherwise included with the card.

FAQ

Does it modify my Apple //e?

No. It sits in a slot like any other card and reads the bus. Remove it and your machine is exactly as it was.

Can it run without an Apple //e?

Yes. In ONE//e standalone mode the card is a complete Enhanced Apple //e on its own: pull it out of the Apple, power it from the 12 V supply, plug in an HDMI display and a USB keyboard, and it boots from the SD card. See the Standalone page.

Do I still need a monitor?

You need an HDMI display for the card’s output. Your original composite or RGB monitor still works too, but only unaccelerated and only from motherboard RAM (all modes with 128 KB fitted; otherwise 40-column, lo-res and hi-res).

Can I use my real cards too?

It depends, there were so many cards and so many different configurations. Real Mockingboard/Phasor run alongside the virtual ones. The original Apple mouse card does not work on the ONE due to a stronger than normal pull-up on the IRQ line. We hope to resolve this in a future card. The workaround is to use a USB mouse through the virtual mouse card. One advantage of the virtual mouse card is that it fixes an important bug in the original Apple mouse card firmware.

How do I get software onto the SD card?

Three ways: put the SD card in any reader; connect the card’s orange (top) USB-C port to a PC or Mac and mount it as a USB drive; or share it over FTP on your network. The last two work without ever ejecting the card.

When does it ship?

Shipping starts September 2026, in small first-come batches. Reserve to hold your place.