Re: CDR's & MP3 for GS???

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes...

>spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:
>
>>    I think the reason for the lack of CD-ROM titles for the IIgs
>>has to do with 1) Very few IIgs owners have a CD-ROM drive hooked
>>up to their systems and 2) The Apple IIgs software market died
>>long before compact discs and drives became affordable.
>
>Unless you unleash the USER CREATED software forum.
>I'm taking about the bastion of people who create
>HyperCard or HyperSudio based software.  This is the
>target audience I'm talking about.  These people create
>software for the sole purpose of enjoying it and sharing
>it with others.  But they are hampered by storage
>considerations.  It would be silly to try to upload a 300MB
>archive to ground and Zip disks costs too much as a
>distributing medium for non-profit software distribution.

[lots snipped]

    I do agree with your basic arguement. The standard storage
medium on which Apple IIgs software is distributed is an 800K
floppy disk (some people now use 1.44 MB floppies, Flopticals,
Zip disks and SyQuest carts, but they are in the minority). As
it stands that really limits how large programs can be--even
though it may eventually install to a hardisk, the program has
to get stored on floppies to be distributed. Wolf 3D comes on
3 or 4 floppy disks, but imagine if it came on 50-100 disks?

    Larger offline storage *would* be benefical obviously, but
I still think 650 MB at a shot is overkill. Say you do create
large HyperStudio stacks, the IIgs still doesn't generate large
data files. If you create digitized audio recordings of music,
it cannot exceed 6-7 megabytes because there is no such thing
as a spooling digitization program (and how do you play back
samples even that large if HyperStudio doesn't have the same
spooling playback capability as Oversampler?).

    For a single Apple IIgs user alone, to create and fill up
650 MB of data, would be quite some undertaking. I think in
the end most of the CD would get wasted, where only 15-30 MB
of space would get used (more realistically, much less even).
Still, if a user today does create a 30 megabyte HyperStudio
stack, all he or she needs to do is compress it with ShrinkIt,
give it to a PC or Mac user (null-modem, through a Zip disk,
etc) and then have them burn the *.SHK archive to an HFS disc.
Nothing is stopping anyone from doing this (like you writing
that Hyperstack game for example) and then anyone with a CD-ROM
drive and hardrive with large HFS partition could have a look
at it. Right?

>>    In any case, this is all fantasy since it doesn't seem
>>likely the GS would be fast enough to support a CD-R burner.
>
>This has not been proven.  Now before you start
>attacking me saying "he thinks I'm GS bashing again"
>or something crazy like that, I'm not saying that
>I'm 100% sure it can be done.  But they said the
>same thing about FAX on the IIGS, MultiFinder for
>the IIGS, UNIX style shells for the IIGS, multitasking
>for the IIGS, and TCP/IP for the IIGS.  They've been
>proven wrong for all of these and today these tasks
>can be done on the IIGS.  You will forgive me if I
>take your view with a grain of salt?  Again, I'm not
>saying I am sure it can be done.  Only that until
>it is proven that it can't be done, it is still within
>the realm of possibility and maybe even probability.

    I personally don't own a CD-R, but my brother does and I've
seen his system burn CD's on many occasions. It looks fairly CPU
intensive as far as I can tell, since it _noticably_ slows down
the machine (not that he uses it during a burn--he just dimms the
screen and walks away until the process is complete). Oh, did I
mention his system is a 292 MHz Pentium with 83 MHz bus? It's
possible that's slightly faster than your average Apple IIgs. ;-)

    If it can be done, that'd be great, but I can't see a lot
of Apple IIgs users rushing out to buy CD-R drives for their
systems. No one has even taken advantage of CD-ROM readers for
the Apple IIgs so far, and again, that does not require you
have a CD-R burner on that same system to publish CD-ROM
based games and stacks.

    One last thing, before you label me as anti-IIgs person 
once again, I would *love* to see someone write a game or 
program that uses several hundred megabytes of data and ships 
on a CD. I enjoy seeing the IIgs pushed to do things not
imagined before, and it would encourage me to track down an
external SCSI CD-ROM drive for my system (DiscQuest and 5 or
6 discs filled with only SHK archives hasn't been enough i
incentive for me so far).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca