Understanding the Apple II

What Hacker News says

1. ksherlockJan 2026
   For Apple-II specific info, consider

   The Assembly Lines book -- https://archive.org/details/AssemblyLinesCompleteWagner

   Understanding the Apple IIe -- https://archive.org/details/understandingapp0000sath

   Understanding the Apple II -- https://archive.org/details/understanding_the_apple_ii

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2. edanuffAug 2024
   Project co-creator here - This was something I'd wanted to do since I first started playing with FPGAs 20 years ago but the idea was resurrected during the pandemic. It's definitely easier with an FPGA but there are other projects that interface an ESP32 or RP2040 to the Apple II bus. The FPGA approach allows you to architect your logic in ways that are much closer aligned to the original hardware design and in many cases, you can directly translate Sather's logic diagrams to Verilog code. BTW, Sather's book has recently been reissued: https://www.callapple.org/books-3/understanding-the-apple-ii...
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3. wkjagtNov 2023
   This, and "Understanding the Apple II" by Jim Sather are two of my favorite books. It's a lot of fun to open up my Apple 2 (it's a clone but the motherboard is 99% identical), and imagine all the different ICs doing their specific tasks, and the relations between those task, with these books as a guide.
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4. abktJan 2026
   Is the Apple II Reference Manual good for that ? Or anything specific to the Apple II, like "What's Where in the Apple" or "Understanding the Apple II" ?
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5. not_clearJan 2026
   As mentioned in the link above, Assembly Lines is still in print as a paper book (maybe it's print on demand, but it's a hardcover).

   I just noticed that Understanding the Apple IIe also got a re-issue from Call-A.P.P.L.E. in 2024 (print edition from Lulu) - https://www.callapple.org/books-3/understanding-the-apple-ii... .

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6. ajrossNov 2023
   FWIW, while this is a reasonably good book (though stay away from the Disk section, IIRC it completely misunderstands the way the Apple encoding works), consensus is that "Understanding the Apple II", by Jim Sather, is the clearly best work on the subject: https://archive.org/details/understanding_the_apple_ii
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