Hot on the heals of the CFFA3000 resuming production, Big Mess O’ Wires has posted an article unveiling the “Yellowstone” disk controller. The Yellowstone is an FPGA-based disk controller for the Apple II, capable of emulating vintage controllers that have become difficult and/or expensive to obtain. In particular, Yellowstone was designed to clone the “LIRON” controller, also known as the UniDisk 3.5 Controller, which was a “smartport” disk controller for the Apple II+ and //e. Although the //c and //gs include smart-port controllers on-board, this card was the only way to attach a smartport hard drive to an Apple II+ or //e.
The Yellowstone is currently capable of booting an Apple II from a hard drive (provided by a FloppyEMU in the demo) and a 3.5″ unidisk.
The controller is not yet for sale, and tt looks like there will be several challenges to putting into production. The female DB-19 connector used for the smartport is no longer in production, for instance. Still, this looks like great progress in providing easier storage upgrades for II+ and //e owners. Hopefully we’ll get to see this card available in the not-too-distant future!
Link: bigmessowires.com
