An accelerator or a new Mac???

[Phoenyx <quazar@dcnet2000.com>]

For what it's worth, anything other than an accelerator or adapter
is akin to making a new computer. While a new computer base could
certainly be useful in expanding the current state of computing
affairs, it is not in the best interests of the Super-GS you are
planning.

In the course of editing this message, I came up with another idea
that I hope will be more functional and feasible. But I must note,
I am not an electronics engineer. I don't know if my ideas would
work, although, based upon the hardware knowledge I do have they
seem fairly realistic.

If you make a new CPU based system with it's own capabilities, all
new software for it will only be able to execute on these enhanced
systems. Effectively you eliminate the original A2 user base. If
you make a card based enhancement, you are basically duplicating
an accelerator such as the Transwarp GS. Granted, the accelerator
would be the most accepted upgrade, it does not offer the extra
options which many of you desire. Somewhere in here must be a
happy medium we can all agree on.

One of the best upgrades I have made for any of my Apple II's is
the accelerators and second is the Focus card although extra ram
is a close third. One of the next upgrades I am planning is to
aquire an IDE adapter from SSH. I think it would be a boon to be
able to access the variety of IDE devices available.

Yes, I would love to see a new Apple II compatible computer, but
only if it is capable of running my older A2 software. At least
the original 8 bit stuff. One of the benefits of the original
Apple II series was it's backwards compatibility. Of course, this
could be emulated in much the same way as the GS does, but this
emulation offers no chance of GS compatibility and then it brings
up the question 'Why build a new GS which uses emulation? You
might as well just use an emulator'. Ah, but I digress.

IMHO, it would be better to design an accelerator which can be
plugged into the old CPU connector with access to another set of
ram and the ability to perform multitasking. In fact, multitasking
would be one of it's biggest benefits. With this feature, it could
be running a 65816 (or 32) cpu in one task and perform a multitude
of other functions in other tasks. With the card having access to
more ram, it could eliminate the bottleneck many of us experience
on the GS, by sharing some of that ram with the GS.

This cpu replacement would basically be a computer on a card. This
system could have it's own peripheral connections. Even better, it
could use a system similar to that employed by the old Laser
computers. WIth an external bus that has it's own power supply the
computer could be designed to access virtually any type of device
available.

With this 'CPU' in place, the GS could still perform it's standard
tasks, and do so at a phenomenal speed, plus any new tasks which
can be assigned to the new cpu.

This new cpu could be used to perform a variety of functions not
currently available to the GS. This would include interfacing to
an ethernet network, connecting to an ISP (if not supplied via the
ethernet), simulated Appletalk drive storage (to allow storage to
a large HD and bypass the HFS bugs which some people have
mentioned) among a variety of other uses. If correctly designed,
the other cpu could use any of the GPL OS's available. In fact,
there is a version of Linux which is embeddable and might be the
perfect choice for such a project. Using the GPL software would
give the project engineers access to some high quality development
software and might spark the interest of some of the Linux
development team. These guys love a new challenge and a system
like this might just be the new platform they are looking for. :-)

It should be reasonably easy to pass data between the two systems.
One interface could simulate a P8 block device which would probably be
the most used method. Another method would involve a
card in one of the GS slots which could be used to link into a TCP
based local network. While I'm not a hardware expert, I think many
of these ideas would be feasible.

If you can't tell, my personal wish list for a GS upgrade is the
ability to access my ethernet based home network. The ability to
use more ram of the simm variety. A reasonably priced system wide
accelerator and the ability to use PC based drives, either the
floppy drives or the IDE style drives.

One thing I don't want is to turn my GS into another Mac or Windows
based system.

-- 

Phoenyx

Have you fed your Apple today?

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