Re: New IIgs owner.

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Alex Eisenhut wrote:

>Well, thanks for your reply. I wasn't exactly overwhelmed by responses.
>I guess the Apple II community is a bit 'closed' compared to the C=
>community. Or maybe the IIgs is an orphan, who knows.

Don't give up so quickly.  ;-)  There are lots of folks who can, and will,
help, but your questions were pretty general and hard to answer
briefly.  Reading the FAQ would be a good start.  (Check Google
Groups for the recent FAQ's (sent a week ago) or read them on
the web.)

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.

And look carefully at the ROM pinout and addressing before burning
one--the high address bit is inverted.

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.

The IIgs is a really nice computer, particularly considering its vintage.
With a couple megs of RAM, it runs a very competent GUI OS, whose
most recent release is GS/OS 6.01.  A hard drive really does make
sense, since everything goes much faster and without disk swapping.
You can get an IDE disk-on-a-card for about $70 (the Focus drive), or
you can go open-ended (for CD-ROM, ZIP drives, etc.) by getting a
SCSI card and drive (eBay?).

Welcome to the Apple II community, which isn't as small and "closed"
as it may seem at first glance!

-michael

 Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
 Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/