Re: New IIgs owner.

[CUTjblakeney@sympatico.ca (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 16 Dec 2001 03:52:43 GMT, mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote:

>The short answer is that only Apple II's can read/write Apple 5.25"
>disks.  Macs and Apple II's can read/write 800K 3.5" disks.  Though
>C= and Apple 5.25" drives are both GCR, they are totally incompatible
>GCR codes.  Most of the disk decoding is done in the CPU for Apple,
>while most (all?) is done in the drive for Commodore.

The Commodore 1541 drive is an "intelligent" drive in that it has a
processor, ROM and RAM in it.  Because of this, I'm pretty sure I
remember hearing that you could send code to the drive to allow you to
read/write Apple II format disks.

>BTW, the ROM 3 IIgs is not just a ROM upgrade--there's a megabyte
>on the motherboard and some audio upgrades.  It's a new board layout.

Another problem is that the ROM 0/1 machines only have 128 KB of ROM
and the ROM 3 has 256 KB of ROM.  However, most of the extra ROM in
the ROM 3 is just updated toolbox routines so that they didn't need to
be loaded from disk all the time.  If you have a decent hard drive,
there isn't much difference in between running stuff on a ROM 0/1 or a
ROM 3.  This is also due to the fact that even the ROM 3's updated
routines have been updated if you are using System 6.0.1 which is the
latest version of the operating system.

--
 Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II Unversity on A2Central.com
               - CUT the obvious from my address to e-mail me