Those two are definitely idols of mine for the kind of clever stuff they managed to pull. folklore.org is one of those k-hole sites I need to avoid if I don’t have several hours to waste.
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This has already been addressed - in detail - and somewhat refuted - with facts - upthread.
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Actually V-Tech already did it. 
The Laser 128 family of Apple II clones was a completely legit clean room reverse-engineer of the Apple II ROM. I had a Laser back in the day and never found a single thing that didn’t run properly on it! They did it the right away after Franklin didn’t and got sued out of existence.
It’s pretty irrelevant for hobbyist emulation because the genuine ROMs are trivial to get anyway. Where it would be nice for Apple to release the ROMs is so that we can make games that run on emulation internally but double-click-launch on modern machines.
There is a stripped down boot-only version of the ROM that someone wrote (a link to which I cannot find right now). This is used in recent commercial products like Nox Archaist. This is an okay solution for some users, but having the full genuine ROM that we can use commercially would be a lot nicer, and there’s no reasonable objection to Apple giving it to us.
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Yeah, that’s basically why I hope Apple will either release one themselves, or arrange for a trusted third party to publish ROMs that Apple will tolerate. Maybe outsource it to woz.org?
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The retro community could definitely do it, but I don’t think there’s enough incentive right now, given that the ROMs are so trivial to pirate and all any of us really want to do is play and write games on the emulators. If there was enough of a commercial market for the modern retro games being written now, it might happen.
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do any of the emulators support the mockingboard? I’d like to learn what I missed.
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I grew up with a ZX81, and my richer friends had Spectrums. We had an IT Dept at school with 3 Commodore PETs in it that were never used, run by the biology teacher, because he ‘had one of these computer things at home’
. Then I discovered sex and drugs and festivals and went off to live in a bus with no electricity.
Some years, later, having been persuaded not to live in the woods and spend all summer being chased by cops who Weren’t Having Any Of That Nonsense Anymore, getting hold of an Amiga was a fucking revelation. A friend of mine still has an A3000 he occasionally uses to make music. I still covet it hugely. Ahhh, what could have been.
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Nice! In a similar vein, take a look at this lovely piece of 1980s executive computerised whizzery:
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