Apple IIe Twitter ticker

A hand input bootloader and a custom communications protocol are what bring the Apple IIe Twitter ticker to life. [Chris Yerga] bought the decades-old machine for $20 at a flea market. Having just completed his TweetWall he decided to adapt the idea for the 1 MHz machine. He manually input a 50 byte bootloader that would let him dump programs into memory via the joystick port. From there he rigged up a connection with a USB FTDI cable. Now the images and text are processed by a modern-day machine and fed to the Apple IIe at 3600 baud. See this in action after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM]

18 thoughts on “Apple IIe Twitter ticker

  1. Ok. So this thing is just a fancy monitor and not actually pulling the information and processing. Just doing the output.

    Wheeeeellllll. The only OBVIOUS solution here is to create an arduino that will emulate the bigger computer and just build it into the AppleII.
    (Actually that would be kinda cool)

  2. It’d be cool to hack a copy of “where in the world is carmen sandiago” or “oregon trail” and have the screen show images from the game(s) with the twitter text.

  3. There’s lots of fun way to stream data and programs to a vintage apple. I put one up here a few years ago using a serial bootloader, which has an advantage of 1) no typing and 2) no floppy drive. Provided you have the serial card installed, no hardware hacks necessary. I also added on-the-fly compression and decompression.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/a2gameserver/

    One of these days I’ll get around to streaming video, much like the second life demonstration, but more portable (using java, so more platform agnostic)

  4. Meh. They are just using it as a terminal – nothing special here. The serial port uses standard protocol, just keep IN’ing port 2 and printing the data. That also isn’t ASCII art, it was a special video mode of the apples with graphics on top, and text on the bottom – a lot of RPGs used this (Castlevania comes to mind first)

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