Those of us who are original Apple IIGS users (or were)
know that Apple dropped the ball when it came to the
Apple II user base.
There have already been too many debates as to why
Apple never made a successor to the Apple IIGS or
why the Macintosh is NOT it but the fact is, the
Apple IIGS was the last of the line.
For years, many of us upgraded our machines with
third party enhancements. We saw Mac and PCs
come and we saw them go. Mac LC came, I was
not interested. I upgraded my IIGS. Windows 3.1
PCs came and I upgraded my IIGS. Finally, the
Pentium class PCs showed up along with Win 95
and 3dfx came out with the Voodoo line of 3D
accelerators. I finally moved on.
I still have my IIGS and the sheer extent it has
been upgraded is in itself a work of art. I shall keep
it as a testimony to what IIGS users could do in
the face of betrayal from Apple.
I always wanted to build the upgrade to the IIGS
that Apple never provided. I looked into many
motherboards but none ever fit. Besides, not only
would it have to fit but it would have to remain true
to the spirit of the Apple IIGS. IIGS means
integrated graphics and sound. The IIGS 4096
color palette graphics were decent in its days
and the sound was first among any personal
computer in its day. There would also need to be
a power supply that was compatible with the new
motherboard.
Now there is such a hardware combination. There
is a Shuttle PC kit that features a motherboard
built around the nVidia nForce2 chipset with a
tiny but adequately powerful power supply. The
sound is first class, nVidia's integrated
SoundStorm system derived from the sound
hardware in the Xbox. The graphics are decent
Geforce2 MX440 class. This balance is very
true to the spirit of the Apple IIGS. In addition,
the integrated features of this chipset incorporates
everything imaginable. USB 2.0, Firewire,
network support, dual channel DDR PC2700
(DDR333) memory support, HyperTransport
interconnects, etc.
The plan is to take the parts from the Shuttle kit
and put them into the case of an Apple IIGS.
The CPU would be an Athlon XP 3000+. There
would be two 512MB DDR333 memory modules,
one in each of the 64-bit banks for full 128-bit
dual channel bandwidth. The Shuttle kit includes
a heatpipe so cooling should be no problem in
the crowded IIGS case. The back panel would
need to be modified for the new port configuration
but that should not be too hard. No extra
peripheral cards are needed because everything
is integrated.
The keyboard will be a genuine Apple USB
keyboard. The monitor will be a PC 15-inch
LCD screen (Apple LCD with ADC adapter is an
option but the PC LCD is preferred due to price).
The operating system will be Windows XP with
third party software that includes various themes
with the one active being the MacOS X lookalike.