The Apple II is one of the three personal computers that appeared in 1977, alongside the Commodore PET and the TRS-80. Designed by Steve Wozniak and marketed by Apple Computer, it stood out from its rivals with color display, BASIC in ROM and, above all, its eight internal expansion slots, which allowed a whole ecosystem of third-party cards to grow around the machine.
The Disk II floppy drive, released in 1978, was the real trigger: fast and cheap for its time, it moved the software library from cassette to floppy disk and opened the way to mass software publishing. Two years later, VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, sold the machine to businesses on its own and remains the textbook example of a "killer app".
The range lasted sixteen years: Apple II+ in 1979, Apple IIe in 1983, the portable Apple IIc in 1984, then the 16-bit Apple IIGS in 1986, until production stopped in 1993. Widely deployed in American schools, the Apple II hosted a huge game library — Ultima, Wizardry, Karateka, The Oregon Trail — and it is on this machine that Jordan Mechner created Prince of Persia.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro applewin | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| gsplus | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Libretro AppleWin is the default emulator on every board: it is the libretro port of AppleWin, the reference emulator for the Apple II, II+ and IIe. GSplus is offered as a second choice: it is the Apple IIGS emulator, which also runs the 8-bit software of the range thanks to that machine's backward compatibility. Netplay is not available on this system. RetroAchievements are supported. CRT output is handled by AppleWin.
A keyboard is mandatory on this system: the Apple II boots into a BASIC prompt or into the disk menu, and nearly every piece of software expects precise keys. A mouse is recommended for graphical software, and a pad remains optional — it replaces the original analog joystick in action games.
No BIOS is required for the default emulator.
GSplus is the Apple IIGS emulator: if you pick it to run an Apple II game, it needs the Apple IIGS ROMs described on the Apple IIGS page.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/apple2/
Supported extensions per emulator:
| Emulator | Extensions |
|---|---|
| Libretro AppleWin | .2img .2mg .apl .bin .do .dsk .gz .hdv .iie .m3u .nib .po .woz .yaml .zip |
| GSplus | .do .dsk .nib .po |
A few pointers about these formats:
.dsk is the most common disk image; .do and .po are the two possible sector orders for the same floppy (DOS 3.3 and ProDOS);.2mg (and its .2img variant) adds a header telling the emulator which sector order is used: it is the safest format when a .dsk refuses to boot;.nib and .woz preserve the physical protection of the original floppies — .woz, the most faithful one, is the format to prefer for protected commercial games;.hdv is a hard disk image;.zip archives run without being extracted with AppleWin.For a game spread over several floppies, create an
.m3ufile listing the images in order, one per line, and launch that.m3u: disk swapping is then done from RetroArch's Disk menu.
Recalbox ships with three Apple II games: Hi-Res Adventure 1 - Mystery House, Lamb Chop Source and Retro Fever. The full list of included games is on the Included games page.