When Is An Apple Laptop Not A Macbook? When It’s An Apple II

May 29, 2026 by Tyler August 23 Comments

Do you remember, some years ago, when that brand-new 8086-based laptop hit the shelves? Great for PC lovers, but not so fun for those on the fruitier side of the street. Well, the same Chinese firm that brought us the Book8086 are back, this time with an ‘Apple’ Laptop that is decidedly not a MacBook– the Book II is a dual-processor Apple II clone in a laptop form factor.

… but just look at all those DIPs on the inside. Authentically retro!

Dual processor? On an Apple II? It wasn’t that uncommon, back in the day — that’s what the Z80 softcard was, after all: a second processor that let you run CP/M and associated business applications, and this one has it built-in. It also has the 80-column video card, a second floppy controller, a printer interface, and a 16 kB ROM card for languages. That leaves two of the Apple’s expansion slots available, one of which is broken out externally on the back of the laptop, along with the printer and floppy ports.

Useful? Probably no more so than the NEC V20-based PC version. Still, those did find buyers and we have no doubt that this new laptop will, too. Especially since with the right expansion card, you might get this machine running DOS as well. Of course if you don’t feel like shelling out the quid or running an emulator, you can always roll your own Apple II on an FPGA.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip! We usually steer clear of product announcements like this, but [Stephen] figured we’d be interested in this one since we covered the then-new retro PC versions way back in 2023.

Spreadsheets Apple ][ Style

October 26, 2025 by Al Williams 9 Comments

It is hard to remember a time when no one had a spreadsheet. Sure, you had big paper ledgers if you were an accountant. But most people just scribbled their math on note paper or, maybe, an engineering pad. [Christopher Drum] wanted to look at what the state of the art in 1978 spreadsheet technology could do. So he ran VisiCalc.

Surprisingly, VisiCalc got a lot of things right that we still use today. One thing we don’t see much of is the text-based menu. As [Christopher] puts it, when you press the slash key, “what first appears to be ‘the entire alphabet’ pops up at the top of the screen.” In reality, it is a menu of letters that each correspond to some command. For example, C will clear the sheet (after prompting you, of course).

Interestingly, VisiCalc of the day didn’t do a natural order of evaluation. It would process by rows or by columns, your choice. So if cell A1 depended on cell B5, you’d probably get a wrong answer since A1 would always be computed before B5. Interestingly, the old Apple didn’t have up and down keys, so you had to toggle what the right and left keys did using the space bar. Different times!

This is a great look into a very influential piece of software and its tutorials. If you have old VisiCalc files you want to drag into the 21st century, [Christopher] explains the convoluted process to get mostly there.

We’ve been known to abuse spreadsheets pretty badly, although we’ve seen worse.

It’s A CoCo! No, It’s An Apple II!

March 2, 2024 by Jenny List 2 Comments

Original retrocomputing hardware is now decades old and showing its age, so the chances are it’s more common in 2024 to experience a machine from the 1970s or 1980s by way of an emulator on a modern machine than it is on the real hardware. There’s another more limited emulation scene as similar 8-bit machines emulate each other, for example when the very similar Dragon 32 and Tandy CoCo have a go at each other’s software. Rarest of them all though is when one classic machine emulates another with a different architecture, but that’s exactly what’s happened with [DragonBytes], who has persuaded a Tandy CoCo to emulate an Apple II.

The two machines have significant hardware differences, but we’re guessing that the project is helped a little by the Motorola 6809 in the CoCo and the MOS 6502 in the Apple having both in a sense been different visions of a successor to the Motorola 6800. Thus their architectures while different, are not diametrically opposed. The other hardware is certainly not so similar though, with Moto’s 6847 display chip in the Tandy being far more conventional than Steve Wozniak’s clever NTSC hacks to achieve a color display for minimal cost on the Apple.

The project is written in assembler, and doesn’t by any means claim to support all Apple modes, or be cycle accurate. But it’s a hugely impressive achievement nevertheless.

The CoCo has an enthusiastic following, and has appeared here a few times in the past. We particularly like this video player.

An Apple ][ With A Pendulum

February 5, 2024 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Clocks are a favourite project here, and we can say we’ve seen all conceivable types over the years. Just a software clock on a retrocomputer perhaps isn’t the coolest among them, but [Willem van der Jagt ]’s Apple][ clock has a little bit extra. It takes its time reference from a real pendulum, on an antique wall clock.

A proximity sensor next to a metal pendulum gives an easy way to generate a digital pulse on each pass, but leaves the question of how to transfer it to the computer. With computers of this age the circuitry is surprisingly simple, and in this case he’s sending an interrupt to the machine which the software can pick up for its timing. There is a small logic circuit between the sensor and the interrupt allowing him to gate the pendulum line, triggered from one of the output lines exposed on the Apple’s game port.

The code is written in assembly, and counts the number of pendulum swings before incrementing the number of minutes. It’s an enjoyable reminder of the days when the architecture of a computer was this accessible, and for those of us whose past lies in the Sinclair world it’s also been a little peek into something of how the Apple works.

We think this is the first pendulum-driven retrocomputer clock we’ve seen here at Hackaday, as you might understand when a clock has a pendulum it’s usually a more traditional design.

A Mysterious 6502 Apple 2 Simulator

November 11, 2023 by Julian Scheffers 14 Comments

Nice, visual simulators of CPUs such as the 6502 are usually made much later and with more modern tooling than what they simulate. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if a simulator runs on the very hardware it’s simulating?

This is what [Tea Leaves] stumbled upon when he found a mysterious disk with only “APL6502.SIM” on it. [Tea Leaves] demonstrates the simulator with a basic 6502 assembly program, revealing an animated, beautiful Apple 2 simulator that actually runs on the Apple 2! The simulator shows all the major components of a 6502 and actually animates the complete data flow of an instruction.

But why is this mysterious? It’s mysterious because – a “hello” program aside – it’s the only thing on the disk! Not so much as a single clue as to where it came from. [Tea Leaves] finds out where it comes from, including incorrectly copied disk images and a revelation at the end.

Video after the break.
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Digital Photography Comes To The Apple II

November 1, 2023 by Jenny List 8 Comments

Back in the very early days of consumer digital photography, one of the first stars of the new medium came from Apple. The QuickTake 100 used a novel flat form factor and at its highest resolution could only shoot 640×480 images, but at the time it was a genuine object of desire. It came in Windows and Apple versions, and to use the Apple variant required a Mac of the day with appropriate software.

The interface was an Apple serial connector though, so it was quite reasonable for [Colin Leroy-Mira] to wonder whether it could work with Apple’s 8-bit machines. The result is QuickTake for the Apple IIc, the product that perhaps Apple should have brought us in an alternative 1994.

Fortunately the protocol has already been reverse engineered and forms part of the dcraw package, however the process of extracting the code wasn’t easy. The full resolution and colour of the original pictures has to be sacrificed, and of course once the custom serial cable has been made it’s a painfully slow process transferring the pictures. But to get anything running in this way on such elderly hardware which was never intended to perform this task is an extremely impressive feat. We would have given anything for this, back in the 8-bit days.

If you have a QuickTake and want to use a more modern machine, we’ve got you covered there, too.

It’s A Humble ‘Scope, But It Changed Our World

July 6, 2023 by Jenny List 46 Comments

A few years ago on a long flight across the North Atlantic, the perfect choice for a good read was iWoz, the autobiographical account of [Steve Wozniak]’s life. In it, he described his work replicating the wildly successful Pong video game and then that of designing the 8-bit Apple computers. A memorable passage involves his development of the Apple II’s color generation circuitry, which exploited some of the artifacts of the NTSC color system to produce a color display in a far simpler manner than might be expected. Now anyone seeking a connection with both Pong and the Apple II can have one of their very own if they have enough money because [Al Alcorn]’s Tektronix 465 oscilloscope is for sale. He’s the designer of the original Pong and used the instrument in its genesis, and then a few years later, he lent it to [Woz] for his work on the Apple II.

This may be the first time Hackaday has featured something from the catalogue of a rare book specialist, but if we’re being honest, for $135,000, it’s a little beyond the reach of a Hackaday scribe. The Tek 465 was a 100 MHz dual-trace model manufactured from 1972 to the early 1980s and, in its day, would have been a very desirable instrument indeed. This one is in pretty good condition with accompanying leads and manual and comes with a letter of authenticity and a hand-written annotation from [Al] himself on its underside. It can be seen up close in the video below the break.

As a ‘scope it’s an instrument many of us would still find useful today, but as the instrument which set in motion not one but two of the seminal moments of our craft, its historical importance can’t be overstated. We hope it will find its way into a museum or similar place where the story of those two developments can be told and that [Al] profits handsomely from its sale.

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