Fresh off of our last post about recent improvements to MAME’s Laser 128 series emulation and the addition of the Franklin Ace 500, the Franklin Ace 2200 has now been added. The 500 was an Apple IIc clone, while the Ace 2200 is a IIe clone. But much as the 500 doesn’t internally work the same way as a IIc, the 2200 has some important internal differences from the IIe. This includes two added soft switches which allow an 8K ROM to be banked into memory at $A000, which is not bankable on any real Apple II.

There’s also a built-in parallel port and a built-in floppy controller and drives. The Ace 2200 has 2 drives, there was also a 2100 with 1 drive and an Ace 2000 with no drives. We emulate the 2200 because maxing out the drives costs us nothing in emulation-land. If someone perversely wants to change the 2200 to a 2100 or even a 2000, that’s doable though.

Here’s a brief video where we boot up ProDOS 8 2.4.1 and CATALOG its contents to MAME’s emulated Epson ActionPrinter 2000. Other Apple II emulators have printer simulations; because this is MAME the ActionPrinter 2000 is running the printer’s original firmware and emulating the stepper motors, position sensors, and the dot matrix printhead itself to give a bug-for-bug reproduction of the original printer. Similarly detailed emulations of the Apple Silentype, ImageWriter, and LaserWriter printers are in the works and hopefully will appear in 2022.