Re: Newbie : PC-IIGS-II compatibility

[wbdesnoy@acs2.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron Desnoyers Winmill)]

Pierre Baldensperger (balden@extreme.ece.uiuc.edu) wrote:

: I'm an ex-Apple II user and just have the opportunity to
: buy an Apple II GS. I have some very stupid questions
: about it :

These are good questions.

: - Is an Apple II GS compatible with the older Apple II
:   (II+, IIe, IIc) ? To what extent?

My IIgs has run everything that I have thrown at it, but the
RGB monitor seems to smear colour graphics in a most undesirable
manner.  Does anybody know if there is a fix for this. 

: - I know there is some kind of incompatibility between
:   5.25" Apple II disks and 'current' 5.25" drives for PC.
:   The Apple II GS has both a 3.5" and a 5.25" drives. Can
:   the 3.5" II GS disks be read in a PC 3.5" drive ? Can
:   the II GS 5.25" drive read Apple II 5.25" disks ?

Apple II 5.25" floppies can not be read or written by the PC
or Mac world, without special hardware.  The same holds for
3.5" floppies in the PC world.  Most Macs can read the 3.5"
IIgs formatted floppies with something called PC Exchange or
Apple File Exchange.  Perhaps you have a friend with a Mac
which will help you in this endevour?

: - Are there PC utilities to create 3.5" II GS disks from
:   disk images ?

No.  There are two ways to do this on the Mac though.  One
way is to use Macintosh style disk images (which is required
to access Apple II software on Apple's FTP site), and
another is to use a utility which converts SDK style disk
images to Mac style images. 

Good luck. 

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