Apple II GS pickup

[TheMagicM]

I'm fixing to buy a Apple IIGS from a person locally.  Comes w/a monitor, software etc.  I briefly read up on it a while back and they're supposed to be pretty good machines, graphics wise.   Kinda excited about playing some old school games on it.  Anyone have one?

[hamtronix]

non of apples graphics compared to the C= machines... and the sound wasnt great either. but they are fun to tinker with.

[neofree]

IIGS games/graphics compare to early PC games with 16 colors... Like a Tandy 1000.. Or low resolution EGA modes.  Somewhere in between a Commodore 64 and Amiga 500.

If you're a Apple IIe fan it's a nice machine... Else it was way over priced compared to any Tandy 1000.  Some common games for PC were ported for it but that's about it..

[persia]

Apples aren't as good a collectable as Amigas, there were a lot more of them and there was nothing outstanding about them.  

[TheMagicM]

so for $50 you wouldnt mess around with it?  I thought they had some good games/sound ?

[Retro_71]

I personally have a IIGS and a IIE(which is upgrade to max), I like both of them.
Just depends on what you want to do. What does it come with? i hope you get a Memory card also what rom version is it? the early one (ROM 00)is better for compatibility with the older Apple IIE games and Apps where as the later Rom (ROM 01, 03) is better for for the newer OS and Apps also better expandability.
AT $50 for an Apple IIGS (as long as you get a memory card) is a good price.

[Retro_71]

I forgot to add sound is average, better off getting a sound card or using apps that use integer Basic.
But the Apple IIE and IIGS games are great I still love playing Captain Goodnight, Conan, StarBlasers, Astec and Lode Runner...
You can also make a serial cable to hook it up to a PC (Like i do) and transfer you Apple II stuff to disk or HDD.
I dont regret getting them, just dont have too much time for them  :-( .

[DamageX]

The sound isn't bad. It's an 8-bit wavetable chip with 64KB of sample RAM. There is a stupid bug (DACs get reset to zero when the sample loops) and for some reason Apple wired it up for mono only even though it's a stereo chip. But you can play MODs on it and stuff. IIRC there was (at least one) demo which had music ripped from an Amiga demo.

[B00tDisk]

You can visit the virtual Apple II GS website here:

www.virtualapple.org

As far as the IIGS goes, it's the computer the Woz really wanted - he was/is an 8-bit guy at heart!  The IIgs is kind of like...hmm, maybe what the C65 would've been had it been perfected.  The last word in 8bit desktop systems.

I've seen some tricked out with SCSI, big hard drives, video cards, network cards, USB, etc. etc.

Grab it and see how far you can push it!

[B00tDisk]

persia wrote:
Apples aren't as good a collectable as Amigas, there were a lot more of them and there was nothing outstanding about them.

Yeah, go buy yourself a working Apple Lisa - oh, wait, that's right...

[persia]

I wouldn't mess with an old Apple now, my interest is not in old computers in general but rather in the Amiga in particular...

[spookyx]

hell yeah for $50 bucks.  i have an old apple IIc+ i love to play with.  and i am a hardcore Commodore fan

[amigaksi]

>by neofree on 2008/10/4 19:16:08
>
>IIGS games/graphics compare to early PC games with 16 >colors... Like a Tandy 1000.. Or low resolution EGA modes. >Somewhere in between a Commodore 64 and Amiga 500.

I think for games, both C64 and A500 would be better as they had hardware sprites.  A500 also has a blitter, faster clock rate, etc.  And IIgs came way too late to compare with 8-bit machines like Atari 800XL, C64, PC (8088-based).

>If you're a Apple IIe fan it's a nice machine... Else it was way over priced compared to any Tandy 1000. Some common games for PC were ported for it but that's about it..

All their Apple IIn models (n is an arbitrary ASCII character 32..127) were highly priced compared to 8-bit machines at the time and had less hardware features.

[amigaksi]

>by Retro_71 on 2008/10/4 22:33:09

>I forgot to add sound is average, better off getting a sound card or using apps that use integer Basic.
>But the Apple IIE and IIGS games are great I still love playing Captain Goodnight, Conan, StarBlasers, Astec and Lode Runner...

The IIE only uses the speaker beep for sound and the graphics/sprites for games are worse than C64/Atari 800XL/PC.  By the time the IIGS arrives, people are writing games for Amiga, Atari ST, PC (80286 w/EGA or better).

>You can also make a serial cable to hook it up to a PC (Like i do) and transfer you Apple II stuff to disk or HDD.
>I dont regret getting them, just dont have too much time for them .

If the IIGS came during peak of 8-bit computers, it would have made a bigger difference.  And the 2.8Mhz 65816 in the machine is really not true 16-bit; it uses an 8-bit data bus.