gssquared

An Apple II series emulator with three design goals: cover 8 bit and 16 bit models, run cross platform, and keep a simple interface. It claims, along with MAME, to model most of the line.

GSSquared is described as a complete Apple II series emulator. The three primary design goals are supporting both 8 bit and 16 bit Apple IIs, being cross platform, and having a simple, intuitive interface that is packaged well. The goals are stated up front and the rest of the README hangs off them.

To the author's knowledge it is the only emulator besides MAME that models most of the 8 bit Apple II as well as the 16 bit Apple IIgs. The supported models are the Apple II, the Apple II plus, the Apple II e, the enhanced Apple II e, and the enhanced Apple II e with the 65816 CPU. That covers most of the family in one codebase.

Graphics, sound, and I/O run through the SDL3 library, described as video game oriented, which suits an emulator and is credited with making builds across three very different platforms possible. Pre compiled packages exist for the Mac, with a note that macOS must be told the downloaded software is acceptable.

Building needs a clang or GCC compiler plus SDL3 downloaded and built from the SDL website. The project tries to force Clang, overrideable by editing the CMakeLists file, and builds go to the build directory. A debug build turns on assertions, disables optimizations, and enables memory leak and buffer overrun checking. On macOS the build installs an app bundle named GSSquared, a disk image can be built from the project root, and a program files mode produces an executable for command line use.

GSSquared aims at the whole Apple II family, from the original 8 bit machines to the 16 bit Apple IIgs, with SDL3 handling graphics and sound. Pre built Mac packages exist, and building needs clang or GCC plus SDL3.

• Source 1 · Project repository
• Source 2 · README