Completely overkill, but...

[blusnowkitty]

So I found a lead on one of these Zilog Z8 CCP development/hardware emulator boards, looks to be from the mid-1990s, complete with 32K of RAM. Any reason why we couldn't just... use this devkit board in place of an XROM Z8? Like I said, completely overkill for just stuffing in a ProFile or repro AppleNet card and leaving it permanently, but maybe useful for loading up the LLF ROM or debugging the AppleNet card while it's running?

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/zilog-z8-ccp-emulator-423457597
https://blog.adafruit.com/2015/03/16/secret-tools-of-the-old-crow-roll-your-own-ice-boards/

[stepleton]

It might be a nice thing to have! But it might not be too necessary --- maybe a logic analyser telling you the program counter could do most of the work?

I say that of course without ever having tried it. If you can get your hands on one for cheap, you should probably do it :-D

For AppleNet, one thing that would be loads of help would be to understand better what the stream encoder/decoder PAL (part no. 341-0180) is up to. My wild guess is that it converts regular bits and bytes to some kind of encoded version for the network, but I don't have any basis for saying so. If anyone wants to take a crack at it, the JED file is here on Bitsavers...

[patrick]

The in circuit emulator allows you to look into the microcontroller. Checking register contents etc. If you just want to run some code, something like http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/patrick/Z8emu.htm plus an EPROM emulator is sufficient.