Re: Apple IIGS ROM 1 or ROM 3, which is better?

[Polymorph <polymorph69@hotmail.com>]

On Jul 2, 9:17 am, magnusfalkirk <dean.pha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I'm trying to decide whether or not I should swap out the motherboard
> in my IIGS. It's currently a ROM 1 but I've got a ROM 3 motherboard
> that I bought from Ebay. In fact I bought the motherboard before I
> bought the IIGS, also from Ebay, thinking I might be able to upgrade
> my IIe to a IIGS by installing the IIGS motherboard. Since the
> motherboard turned out to be a ROM 3 that option went out the window.
>
> So now my question is would it make sense to upgrade my IIGS with the
> ROM 3 motherboard? What are the advantages and disadvantages? The fist
> advantage that comes to my mind is the 1 meg of ram, and 256k ROM,
> that are part of the ROM 3 board.
>
> Any and all comments and advice from this community are more than
> welcome.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Dean

Dean,

I think I've mentioned this before, but I'll say it again.  :-)

Basically, the ROM01 offers the best compatibility as there were a few
(not many) programs that made use of certain features (read "bugs")
found within a ROM01 IIgs. These programs were mostly games, and there
were many that fell into this category.

The ROM03 was released containing a number of "bug fixes" to the ROMs,
a slightly altered board layout, more of the toolbox routines are
stored within the ROM (ie. making it considerably faster for these
routines), and an additional 1Mb RAM. The ROM03 is also considered to
be a "cleaner" design with the result being that the audio output is
of a higher quality due to less background noise (probably not
noticable unless you run external speakers).

All this being said, unless you want to run one of the few games that
refuses to run on the ROM03, my advice would be to install the ROM03
for the benefits that it provides. That is what I did. I gave my
daughter the old ROM01 board in my infamous //e -> IIgs conversion.

cheers,
-p