Re: Me and My new Apple IIGS

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <19980315193101.OAA15150@ladder03.news.aol.com>,
Clay Edge <clayedge@aol.com> wrote:
>I just bought an Apple IIGS as kind of a hobby.  It is a ROM01 machine with a
>fully populated 1meg expansion card.  I was wondering if anyone out there has
>some advice to give to upgrade this machine.  I want at least 4meg ram, a Hard
>Disk,   quite possibly an accellerator card.  

   I invite you to read the comp.sys.apple2 Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ) at http://www.visi.com/~nathan/a2/faq/csa2.html It has lists of
vendors (section 10.2) and lots of detail in how to add in hardware
(section 4.*). Ram and a HD are fairly easy, but all accelerator cards
are out of production-- nobody was buying them before, and so it's
suddenly a seller's market.

>Also if I get a modem, added to the mix, is there any site out there
>that I can connect to with this older machine.

   FAQ section 7.1: either any ISP with a dialup shell account or a
SLIP account. Proprietary protocols and interfaces like AOL (which
you're on, sorry) are NOT supported. [AOL voluntarily ditched their
Apple II support a few years ago, instead of going with an open and
generic protocol that people can write their own implementations
of. Just say no to proprietary crud being used for public data
transfer.] That section of the FAQ has links to lists of ISPs that are
far more inclusionary about whom they want to support.


>Also(again) In regards to a R0M03 gs.  What are the differences
>other than the amount of memory?  Would it be hard to purchase a
>ROM03 board and replace the old one?

   FAQ section 2.6 for more detail. Short answer: the ROM 3 has more
ROM, more RAM, slightly cleaner sound, and a few more
incompatabilities with fairly old GS software. Modern system software
makes the ROM 3 and the ROM 01 virtually identical to a well-written
program's standpoint (main difference is RAM, but both can be expanded
to 8MB of program-accessible RAM) My recommendation is to take the
money you might have put into a ROM 3 and buy hardware enhancements
for your 01-- stuff like RAM and/or a HD. That's a much better bang
for your buck investment.

Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? -R.A. Heinlein