Re: IIgs accelerators

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

"Sheane and Bonnie Meikle" <action1@telusplanet.net> wrote:

>Ok I'm no tecky, but it would seem to me that there would be a nice niche
>market for someone that knew what they were doing to create an accelerator
>for the gs or even the whole II line. I wouldn't care what it looked like as
>long as it worked, so even if it was made one at a time using project boards
>it would still sell.

Some time ago, there was a drive to get CMD to do an accelerator for
us IIGS users.  CMD (Creative Micro Devices) makes the SuperCPU64
accelerator for the C64 and the SuperCPU128 for the C128 Commodore
computers.  These make use of a 20Mhz 65C816.

They apparently were intrigued but thought the IIGS market too small.

On the surface, it is understandable that they think this.  After all, the
C64 was one of the most popular personal computers ever built while
the Apple II series as a whole only sold about 12 million units (with
the IIGS occupying about 1.5 million).

I think the C64 sold something like 1.5x that of the entire Apple II
line.

However, CMD has apparently only sold a couple of hundred C64
accelerators.  It seems that the demand for speed is much higher
proportionally in the IIGS world than in the C64 world.

Seeing how used cards are being snapped up at premium prices,
maybe CMD will reconsider.  For sure there are more TWGS and
Zip GS cards out there than SuperCPUs.  Also, those accelerator
cards are hard to come by because IIGS users keep them for
use.