I've been on an apple II kick lately, and even though I have plenty of storage for my machines, I couldn't stop myself from trying out this project:
The card is an Apple II slot card consisting just of simple DIP chips and 0.1uf capacitors. The storage is an 8mbit / 1MB 27c801 EPROM. The git repo has 2 example ROMs, one loaded out with BASIC and some games, and one empty with just the drive firmware on it, and the rest of the space free. I have had some success copying files into this image in an emulator, burning the EPROM, and then putting it onto the card. Obviously once you program it to the physical ROM, it's read only.
There were some for sale on eBay as this is an open source design, but none of the new revision, and none in the US, making a $25 purchase more like a $50 purchase. The budget was kind of the appealing part; I could see this being really useful for testing 'untested' machines, as for $10-$20 worth of parts and some soldering, you have a bootable solid state apple II drive that requires no disk controller or drives to be present. Or if you really use a certain app all the time, and don't want a microdrive turbo, putting that app to ROM and booting to that slot near instantly would be neat I suppose too.
I built this one with a ZIF so I can test different roms, which is fine for slot 7 room wise, but for actual installation / long term use if I actually needed it, I would just use a normal socket. The card itself is quite compact, card pictured with a microdrive turbo for scale.
GitHub - tjboldt/ProDOS-ROM-Drive: A bootable 1 MB solid state disk for Apple ][ computers
A bootable 1 MB solid state disk for Apple ][ computers - tjboldt/ProDOS-ROM-Drive
github.com
The card is an Apple II slot card consisting just of simple DIP chips and 0.1uf capacitors. The storage is an 8mbit / 1MB 27c801 EPROM. The git repo has 2 example ROMs, one loaded out with BASIC and some games, and one empty with just the drive firmware on it, and the rest of the space free. I have had some success copying files into this image in an emulator, burning the EPROM, and then putting it onto the card. Obviously once you program it to the physical ROM, it's read only.
There were some for sale on eBay as this is an open source design, but none of the new revision, and none in the US, making a $25 purchase more like a $50 purchase. The budget was kind of the appealing part; I could see this being really useful for testing 'untested' machines, as for $10-$20 worth of parts and some soldering, you have a bootable solid state apple II drive that requires no disk controller or drives to be present. Or if you really use a certain app all the time, and don't want a microdrive turbo, putting that app to ROM and booting to that slot near instantly would be neat I suppose too.
I built this one with a ZIF so I can test different roms, which is fine for slot 7 room wise, but for actual installation / long term use if I actually needed it, I would just use a normal socket. The card itself is quite compact, card pictured with a microdrive turbo for scale.