What it is

The Appletini ONE already carries most of an Apple //e: the soft 65C02 that powers its TransWarp accelerator, the Enhanced //e ROM, shadow RAM, a cycle-exact video renderer, and a shelf of virtual cards. ONE//e adds the missing piece, a virtual motherboard: keyboard, speaker, soft switches, paddles and annunciators, driven by a free-running Apple bus generated inside the FPGA.

Select it from the boot menu and the card runs the ROM cold start on its own, the way a US Enhanced //e does. The card’s own hardware is all there: SmartPort and Disk II storage from the SD card, the HDMI picture with every video mode, the virtual Phasor, and USB input.

What you need

• The Appletini ONE, out of the Apple.
• A jumper across the two holes at the top left of the card, next to the power jack. In an Apple the card is powered by the slot’s +5 V; the jumper disconnects that path so the DC input powers the card instead. Without it the card stays dark out of the slot.
• The 12 V power supply on the card’s DC input (an optional extra when you reserve).
• An HDMI display on the mini-HDMI port.
• A USB keyboard on the USB-C port. A standard hub lets you add a joystick, gamepad or mouse.
• An SD card with disk images, or the preloaded card with the demo disk.

Audio comes out of the 3.5 mm jack (or optical, if fitted), as always. There is no audio over HDMI.

Turning it on

Open the Appletini menu, go to Boot Settings, and select ONE//e standalone. The row reports OFF, RUNNING or LOCKED. The card first checks that the slot connector is quiet, then isolates its bus drivers, and only then starts the virtual machine. The menu closes on its own once the //e is running.

The choice is saved on the SD card and survives a power cycle, so the card boots straight into ONE//e next time. It is a global setting; profiles neither set nor clear it. Any activity on the Apple bus stops ONE//e at once and saves it OFF; select it again to turn it back on.

Keyboard & joystick

A standard USB keyboard becomes the //e keyboard, US layout, with Shift, Caps Lock, Ctrl combinations, arrows, Delete, Tab, Escape and the numeric keypad. Left Alt or Command is Open Apple; right Alt or Command is Closed Apple. Held keys repeat after half a second, ten per second.

Ctrl+Alt+Delete reboots the virtual //e. It never touches the slot connector’s reset line.

A USB joystick or gamepad with two or more axes maps its sticks to paddles 0–3 and its first three buttons to PB0–PB2. Paddle timing counts real Apple cycles, so games read the same values at any accelerator speed.

The screenshot and TransWarp speed keys from Boot Settings work as usual. Reset, Open Apple, Closed Apple and Pause/Break are fixed in ONE//e; the other USB bindings stay editable.

Disks & boot

ONE//e boots from whatever Boot device names: the SmartPort volumes or the Disk II floppy images on the SD card. The virtual Disk II controller is always present in slot 6 here, even if you have turned it off for use in an Apple with a real controller. WOZ, DSK, DO and PO images all mount.

The SD card can still be mounted over USB-C or shared over FTP to move images on and off.

Video & sound

The HDMI picture is the same as in an Apple: text, lo-res, hi-res, double hi-res, Super Hi-Res, SHR4, Video-7 MIX, and the CRT effects. Choose NTSC (262 lines) or PAL (312 lines) timing from the ONE//e video standard row in Boot Settings; it appears only while ONE//e is active, and a change takes effect at the next virtual reset.

The //e speaker is mixed into the analog audio output alongside the virtual Phasor and the Disk II drive sounds.

Speed & memory

ONE//e runs on the same 65C02 core as the accelerator, so every TransWarp preset from cycle-exact 1 MHz up to 33 MHz applies, with the 1 MHz lock and video-sync options. The speed keys step it live; a speed chosen before ONE//e starts is used from its first instruction.

The machine is a 128 KB Enhanced //e plus the accelerator’s 8 MB of RAM.

Safety

In an Apple, the card drives the slot bus. Standalone, it must not. A supervisor in the FPGA owns that decision: it watches the slot connector’s clock and select lines (PHI0, 7M, Q3 and the selects), refuses to start ONE//e until they have been silent, and if any of them ever moves it cuts the virtual machine in under a microsecond, before firmware is involved, and saves the mode OFF. Address, data, IRQ, INH, DMA and reset drivers are all held off for the whole session.

Limits

• The 8088 coprocessor needs the Apple’s bus and is not available in ONE//e.
• There is no cassette port, and no game-port output for the annunciators or utility strobe. The cassette latch exists for software that toggles it; cassette input reads low.
• No physical Disk II drives, and no physical cards of any kind; it is the virtual hardware only.
• The keyboard translator uses a US layout. Caps Lock works, but the keyboard’s LED does not follow it.
• Storage, sound, video and input are covered above. The other virtual cards are on the same virtual bus and should behave as they do in an Apple, but not every card has been through its standalone compatibility pass yet.

Questions? Get in touch, or read how the virtual bus and safety guard are built on the Developers page.