Re: GS memory expansion

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

suprdave@aol.comDELETIA (SUPRDAVE) wrote:

>Mitchell Spector wrote:
>>
>>    Yep. Both my Apple IIgs's have 4 MB cards installed, since I
>>like to get the most out of the systems. Adding an accelerator
>>and hardrive also drastically help towards making it a usable
>>system (though as mentioned above, you can still make use of
>>any IIgs you may came across with only 1 MB installed; no need
>>for anyone to think it is useless without 4 megabytes).
>>
>>Mitchell Spector
>>spec@vax2.concordia.ca
>
>thanks for the additional info. i plan to use this gs to explore and run apple
>//e  and //c apps. i dont see any point in adding more than a planned 40meg
>scsi drive to mt machine since i already have a mac IIcx that can do the same
>things a hotrodded GS can do.

I would save the money intended for the SCSI card and split
it.  The Focus hard drive on a card from http://www.allelec.com/
is cheaper than the price of many SCSI cards USED.  Get the
Focus hard drive and use what you saved to purchase 2MB for
the IIGS.  That'll get you everything you need to run most IIGS
software.  Besides, the Focus hard drive comes with shareware
and freeware, lots of it.  That 40MB SCSI drive probably won't.

Second, the Mac IIcx can't do EVERYTHING a IIGS can.  ;-)

The IIGS has a wavetable synthesizer chip, the 32 channel
Ensoniq built in.  It is like the old Ensoniq ESQ-1 professional
synth (popular in the 80s) built in.  Look up "ESQ-1" on Yahoo
to see what kind of sound machine is built into the IIGS!  There
are more modern wavetable boards for today's computers, sure,
but there is NO wavetable synthesis at all built into the Mac IIcx.

But you are in luck, my friend.  While the music software,
synthLAB, that comes from Apple can't run on 1MB of memory,
as Mitchell pointed out many older GS software CAN.  It so
happens that a great IIGS music program from those olden
days has recently been released as freeware (not everywhere,
but permission was given to the following ftp server by the
author).

Download  DTGS.v1.1.SDK from
http://ground.ecn.uiowa.edu/apple2/upl98/Jun98/

This is DiversiTune, a 32 voice synthesizer and MIDI
program for the IIGS.  It only requires 768k.  Plug in speakers
or phones into the sound port at the back of the IIGS before
playing it for best effect.

Go ahead and run DiversiTune.  It works on your IIGS
as is (boots from 8-bit ProDOS, so you don't even need
GS/OS or a hard drive, just unshrink the disk and boot).
But THIS is only the tip of the iceberg.  With 4MB, you
can run even better IIGS software.

I started out with IIe and IIc stuff too, but today the only
8-bit non IIGS Apple II software I still use is ProTERM.
IIGS software is just too fun.  Even from a person who
is used to Windows and Macintosh.

ESPECIALLY if you have a Mac, I say.  You see, GS/OS
can read and write Macintosh HFS disks, but of course
you need to run GS/OS first to access Mac disks.  Zip
disks and hard disks too.