Description

Joe’s Computer Museum is an authorized distributor of the CoGS card.

Your Apple II has already been accelerated, given gigabytes of storage, extra RAM and sharp modern video. The one thing none of that fixes is the modern web, which now lives behind TLS encryption that no 6502 or 65816 can reasonably run.

CoGS is a single slot card that handles the impossible parts on the card itself: TLS, HTTPS, JSON, true random numbers and hardware hashing, handing your Apple II plain text. The machine stays in charge of everything else. It is still your Apple II. It can just finally talk to the world.

One card replaces every storage solution and network card your Apple II has ever had, adds capability none of them offered, and gives new software a way onto the modern internet.

Put the card in slot 7 and power on, and its own configuration ROM comes up. Join Wi-Fi, pick a category, browse a catalog of over 1,000 disk images right on the machine, and press Return. Your Apple boots it, streaming over the internet block by block, with nothing installed and no local storage at all. From power-on to running is about a minute.

Then there is your own collection. The free CoGS Image Manager shares a folder of your disk images and your IIGS audio and picture files, and they show up on the card’s menus next to the a2cogs library, organized by your folders. Disk images, audio, and pictures, in one place, browsable and bootable straight from the Apple II. Image Manager runs on the Mac today; Windows and Linux versions are planned.

Features

• Network disk library: over 1,000 boot-tested disk images browsable by category, by machine or A to Z, including Total Replay’s 519 arcade titles, plus any disk image from your own collection shared through the CoGS Image Manager. Press Return and the Apple boots the disk image over the network.
• Mount any disk image, anywhere: point the card at a folder shared from your Mac or a disk image on a web server, and the Apple II sees a real drive it can boot from, read and write back to. The card speaks SmartPort and ProDOS block calls straight out of ROM, so no driver or setup disk is needed. Up to eight drives can be mounted at once.
• Boot any drive on the fly: hold a number key 1 through 8 as the machine powers on and the card boots the disk image mounted on that drive, without touching the saved boot disk. Or turn on the optional boot menu, which lists your mounted drives at power-on and waits for a pick.
• Secure web: the card runs the entire TLS handshake and verifies certificates, so your Apple II can talk to real HTTPS APIs and only ever sees plain text.
• JSON without a parser: ask for a single value out of an API response and the card returns just that value. A 64 KB machine never touches a parser.
• True random numbers and hardware SHA-256 hashing in dedicated silicon, for the cost of a few register writes.
• Modern network card: Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet on one board. With the CoGS link layer for Marinetti, your IIGS gets its own IP address and becomes a real host on your LAN, so existing Marinetti software (mail, web, IRC, terminals) runs unchanged. On 8-bit machines an IP65 driver has been demonstrated with telnet65, wget65 and date65, and native 8-bit network programs that talk to the card directly (with TLS) are the next development milestone.
• Audio on the IIGS: 239 tracks and 54 internet radio stations, plus your own MP3 and WAV collection shared through the CoGS Image Manager. SoundSmith songs play natively through the Ensoniq, while PCM tracks and live radio stream through the card, which transcodes MP3 on the fly. Includes EQ, shuffle, playlists and background playback.
• Pictures on the IIGS: press V on any disk image and its box art fills the screen. 724 box covers and title screens in Super Hi-Res, HGR and double hi-res, a further 45,000 individually converted modern photographs in Super Hi-Res browsable by week, and your own picture collection shared through the CoGS Image Manager, all with a slideshow mode.
• Network clock: the card gets the time from the network. On a IIGS it sets the system clock, automatically at power-on if you like. On a //e or ][+ with no clock card, the card’s menu still shows the correct local time, and the CoGS Console utility for ProDOS 8 sets the ProDOS clock so the files you save carry real dates instead of no date at all.
• Network tools in ROM: DNS lookup, ping, traceroute, TCP port checks, a connectivity self-test and a speed test, all run on the card and displayed on the Apple’s screen.
• Over-the-air updates: the card checks for new firmware from the machine itself, then downloads, verifies and flashes it. No cable and no second computer.
• Card vitals: on-chip temperature, the slot’s +5V rail, uptime, serial number and last boot reason, readable even with Wi-Fi down.
• Desktop integration on the IIGS: a Control Panel (CDev) for setup, a Status window (NDA) that floats over any app, and the full card menu as a Classic Desk Accessory that the card installs itself, with nothing on disk.
• Open for developers: a documented slot protocol and client code let your own 6502 or 65816 programs fetch over HTTPS, hash data or pull true randomness in a few calls. A virtual CoGS card runs in the Ample emulator and MAME for development without hardware.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (RP2350, dual core, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi) does the card’s processing. Its micro-USB port is there for firmware recovery; normal updates happen over the air.
• WIZnet W5500 Ethernet controller with an RJ45 jack on the card’s front edge, for wired networking alongside Wi-Fi. The card prefers the cable when one is plugged in and falls back to Wi-Fi when it is not.
• Apple II bus interface derived from the open A2Pico design, so the card meets slot timing on every machine from the ][+ to the IIGS.
• Revision 3.2 production card, designed in the USA by Rob Perissi, based on the open-source A2Pico by Glenn Jones, Oliver Schmidt and Ralle Palaveev.
• Owner’s manual and documentation: a2cogs.com/docs

Compatibility

The same card works in the Apple ][+, //e and IIGS. Because the configuration ROM runs on the machine itself, 8-bit Apples get the full disk experience with nothing installed. Audio streaming, picture viewing and the desktop tools are IIGS features. On an 8-bit machine the disk catalog shows only the titles it can run, 640 of them.

Slot 7 is the recommended slot on every machine. On a IIGS, any slot works: set that slot to Your Card in the Control Panel and set Startup Slot to the same number, and the machine boots from the card. On a //e or ][+, the machine boots from the highest-numbered slot that holds a disk controller, so put CoGS in slot 7, or in any slot above your other disk cards, and it boots on power-on. From a lower slot, PR#n from BASIC (n is the slot number) starts the card.

Sits alongside a CFFA3000, FloppyEmu, Uthernet II or FujiNet in the same machine. Hold M (or C) at power-on to bring up the CoGS menu; C leaves the M key to the CFFA if you keep both.

What’s in the box

The assembled CoGS card, with the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W fitted and the current firmware loaded and tested. No SD card, boot disk or setup software is needed. A network connection is required, over Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz) or the card’s Ethernet jack. The CoGS Image Manager is a free download at a2cogs.com (Mac now, Windows and Linux planned).

More…

CoGS is a community project built on open foundations. The protocol spec, the IIGS software, the Marinetti link layer, the emulator card and the developer documentation are published at a2cogs.com/docs, so anyone can write software for the card today. Firmware ships on the card and updates over the air; the firmware source is planned to open up as the project matures. You can try the card’s own browsing interface, live, at a2cogs.com/browse.