Re: New Apple 2GS owner

[Eric Shepherd <sheppy@syndicomm.com>]

in article p0s66.64732$ca6.1177726@news6-win.server.ntlworld.com, cp at
christian.baillies@ntlworld.com wrote on 1/8/01 3:28 PM:

> I've recently aquired one of these machines, out of interest is it a true
> 16bit machine or does it have an 8bit databus? Also is wolfenstien 3D
> playable at 2.5Mhz??, I'd like to compare it to other versions. How does the
> GS generate its graphics, planer or chunky pixels? I'd have thought planer
> graphics would make conversion quite slow.

The Apple Iigs is sort of a hybrid 8-bit/16-bit system.  It performs better
than you would expect given its processor speed because it's very cleverly
designed.

Wolfenstein 3D lets you adjust the screen size so that you can make it play
well on pretty much any system.  I recommend an accelerator card, but you
don't have to have one.

The GS uses a bitmap graphics system that's pretty typical in non-3D
accelerated personal computers, except that instead of one or two bytes per
mixel, there are either two or four pixels per byte.  The 320x200 graphics
mode Wolfenstein 3D runs in is two pixels per byte.  For performance
reasons, Wolf 3D treats the game area of the screen as a 160x160 pixel
region, with each byte treated as one horizontally doubled pixel.  This
decreases image quality but vastly improves the game's performance.


-- 
Eric "Sheppy" Shepherd
Creating software for everyone!
http://www.sheppyware.net