Re: New ][ Hardware

[johnmac@fawlty.towers.oz.au (John MacLean)]

In article <k9wiyB7w165w@graphics.rent.com> scraft@graphics.rent.com (Steve Craft) writes:
>Yes, Computist Magazine is still around.  And with neew hardware to boot:
>
>SUPER II
> 
>     4MHz 65C816
>     1-16MB SIMM RAM on the board (uses standard 1MB SIMMs)
>     128K system ROM on board
>     plugs into an expansion slot
>     price: $170 assembled with 0 RAM (you order your own and plug in)
>     designed by Chuck Haight, editor of COMPUTIST* magazine
> 
>     Since, except for disk and similar I/O accesses, the board runs
>at the full 4MHz, it is faster than the 8MHz Zip chip (which averages
>about 3.9MHz) and the standard IIgs PLUS you get the advantages of
>direct, linear access to nearly 16MB RAM.

(1) Anyone know why/if the board is limited to 4MHz. Could you plug in
a faster 65816 / crystal and faster memory?
An 8MHz board with no caching would REALLY fly.

(2) What is in the 128K ROM - Or does it just have sockets for 128K ROM.

> This is a 'clean' piece of hardware
>designed for speed and power which takes maximum advantage of the
>65C816. Initially, the plan is to rely upon DOS 3.3 and ProDOS for
>disk I/O. An improved operating system and a more powerful BASIC
>remain to be developed.

(1) It can't be too clean if it relies on Apple // video or on Apple // I/O.

(2) I'll leave it to the readers to stick a Super II and a VOC in a //e,
copy the ROMs from a GS into Super II RAM, do a little bit of patching, and
have GS software running on their //e's at faster than GS speed (Maybe even
on a II+ :-)

(3) If only the GS was much more like this.
A much cleaner design would have been to have two sets of banks 0 and 1,
and only have all the kludges in ONE set only (just like this board).
The GS could have then had a totally linear 16Mb of memory, with no video,
I/O, etc in bank 0 or 1 (or any other bank normally accessable).
GS/OS could then sit anywhere it liked (NOT in bank 0/1), and copy data
to/from the kludge banks for I/O (assuming 8 bit drivers).

[The GS can almost do this by switching the language card over the $C000
area, but unfortunately you then lose access to the slot ROMs which cannot
generally be called from bank $E0, and when they are, stuff up screen holes
in bank $00. Seems like someone thought about this for a few minutes]

(4) I'd love one, but what on earth would I do with it? Without better
video and without an operating system who would buy one? When I say who,
I am refering to developers - real users are an even more distant dream.

Oh what could have been.
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