Soft cards are becoming increasingly popular for vintage computers. Because the cards have modern processors or FPGAs on them, they can easily emulate just about any peripheral ever made for vintage systems, as well as expanding the limits of what can be done on these machines! This ESP32 SoftCard Expansion for the Apple ][ features the ESP32-WROVER-E, a powerful dual-core processor with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built-in. Data is loaded from an SD card, and the list of features is absolutely jaw-dropping.
Like the original Z80 SoftCard, it enables 80-column video output, but this card additionally features audio generation and output. It firmly answers “Yes!” to the age-old question – can it play DOOM? Not only can it play DOOM, but it even supports custom WADs. It can also play Wolfenstein 3D, emulate a Mac Classic, emulate an IBM PC/XT running DOS and Windows 3, emulate Sega Genesis, NES, and TurboGrafx-16, connect to the internet via Wi-Fi, playback videos stored on the SD card… the feature list goes on and on.
The board comes with a 32GB SD card pre-loaded with many of the above features. Additionally, it can work in an Apple IIgs, Laser 128, and many of the Pravetz clone machines. So if you’ve got an Apple II or clone and want to breathe some new life into it, definitely check out the product page, and be sure to read the full list of capabilities in the documentation!
