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These days we are constantly seeing low-cost boards that have huge power (raspberry pi, various arduino-like microcontrollers.)

I am hoping I could make, or get, a clone or emulation of an Apple II that was "stand alone" in a piece of hardware... instead of running within a larger PC.

Can you tell me the options in doing such a thing?

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    You may want to look at something like this too: hackaday.com/2017/10/10/apple-ii-fpga
    – Greg Hewgill
    Aug 30, 2019 at 2:25
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    Can you suggest what facilities it's important (or not important) the clone should have and whether you prefer these to be the original interfaces or emulated? For example, should you be able to attach an original Apple II disk drive to it and use that, or should there be only an emulated drive, or both, or (unlikely I know) no drive at all? The same goes for video output (and the 80 column card), and the langauge, printer and serial cards, just off the top of my head.
    – cjs
    Aug 30, 2019 at 4:06
  • Wow. well, to me personally, no need at all to run an old drive -- I'd be happy to just load disk image files. ... and yeah, for 40/80 columns, well, I'm weird and I guess I'd like an apple II+ so 40 columns would be fine, but hey, if there was a configuration to turn on a super correct standard 80 column display, then hey, that's fair. ** I have to admit that running a good strong emulator on a Raspberry Pi may indeed be the best way for what I'd like. I'm a fan of RetroPie... so... something along those lines... I guess I should learn more about LinApple. But maybe I'm missing something.
    – estephan500
    Aug 30, 2019 at 13:09
  • If you're going with Linapple for emulation, this is the fork that's maintained and is more likely to work: github.com/linappleii/linapple . Linapple-Pi(e) has problems
    – scruss
    Jul 1, 2020 at 13:45

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There's a full clone of a revision 0 Apple II motherboard made by one avid retrocomputing enthusiast.

He no longer has kits for sale, but the board Gerber files are available. Order some boards from a PCB manufacturer, source the components, and you'll have everything to build your own complete Apple II mainboard.

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The MiSTer project is an Open Source effort to create clone consoles/computers on the Terasic DE10-nano FPGA dev kit

They have an Apple II+ core available and the MiSTer can be configured to boot directly into it

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  • This is exciting. A question ... is the apple II+ core pretty solid/robust or does it fail for various uses? For an example, I always thought that someday I would go learn 6502 assembly. Could I on this? Also, would it run common Apple II disk images that I download from various sources? Thanks! I will keep reading.
    – estephan500
    Sep 15, 2019 at 3:43
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    The answer is yes to both. Some of the CPU implementations in MiSTer are “cycle-accurate” (where even timing is identical to the original) and some are functionally accurate - but all of them are accurate enough to learn and run assembly on. For Apple II disk images just drop the *.nib files onto the SD card and you’re good to go
    – jamesfmackenzie
    Sep 15, 2019 at 15:35
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    PS the MOS 6502 used by the Apple II was very popular - found in the Atari 2600, C64, NES and many more. I think it’s likely the implementation is very accurate/good
    – jamesfmackenzie
    Sep 15, 2019 at 15:56

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