Thank you, for posting these informative vintage home computer upgrades to an Apple IIGS system. Whenever, I try to upgrade one of my vintage Apple mac desktops it is always a week of "trail and error". My last attempt was trying to add a PCI card with two USB "A" 1.1 ports to my Apple All-in-One 5500 system. The installation went well only to learn that, I needed drivers that were not included in the retail box (smile...smile).

@70s80sRetroRewind

Ай бұрын

My pleasure. Thanks for watching! I have another one coming out soon on a stereo card for the IIgs. I guess I'm weird, I enjoy the troubleshooting side of things. Well, in my homelab, not in production. lol

In my experience so far there isn't too much that can go wrong with the IIGS ADB keyboard. Mostly if there's a problem, it's with the ADB connector itself. Sometimes the solder joints can break, and on the odd occasion the solder pad get's torn off. The former is pretty easy just to reflow the solder. The latter involves using small copper rivets to replace the solder pads and a jumper wire to complete the circuit.

@70s80sRetroRewind

Ай бұрын

Thanks for the info. I'll take a look.

Very interesting. Well done sir!

@70s80sRetroRewind

14 күн бұрын

Thanks for the feedback!

Nice video, I'm looking to get into Apple 2GS myself.

@70s80sRetroRewind

3 ай бұрын

Thanks for the feedback! I'd recommend it, the market seems to be softening now. (I have this awful habit of searching for "Apple II" in FB Marketplace and Offerup 🙂)

The IIgs was not really a full 16bit computer. It was basically an Apple //e with an accelerator + fast ram attached. Everything apart from ROM, fast-RAM and CPU was 8bit 1MHz. The CPU itself is more or less an 8bit/16bit CPU. It has some 16bit features but so does the Z80. Most people say that the 16bit program counter is the smoking gun to categorize the 65816 into the 16bit realm. Others say that the 8bit commands are a clear indicator for an 8-bit CPU... i would say it is between 8 and 16 bit like the 68000, which was a 16bit/32bit CPU with similar limitations.

@Apple2gs

Ай бұрын

@john_ace - That's grossly inaccurate. The IIGS was indisputably a true 16-bit computer, its 65C816 CPU had a 16-bit internal data bus and 16-bit accumulator, along with a 24-bit address bus. Yes, the CPU had an 8-bit external data bus, but *internally* it bus was 16-bit and that is what determines how many bits it is. The IIGS was hindered by an unnecessary limitation caused by the Mega II, which forced it slow to 1 MHz for its I/O bus and screen writes, but it didn't make it any less of a 16-bit machine. It was of course a hybrid computer with two sides: a 16-bit color Mac-like machine, with backwards compatibility with the 8-bit Apple IIe in emulation mode. It was far more than merely an Apple IIe with accelerator and faster RAM however. In native mode it had a Toolbox, GUI and mouse driven software. A 32-voice Ensoniq wavetable synthesizer co-processor with dedicated RAM. It offered graphic capabilities far beyond what any Apple II computer could produce, nearly on par with the Amiga (640 and 320 mode resolutions, with a 12-bit color palette and up to 256 colors per screen). It had built-in AppleTalk networking, serial ports that could handle 115K, a built-in clock and Control Panel, up to 8 MB RAM, RGB video output, even the ability to do both cooperative and preemptive multitasking. It was a vastly underrated machine, and in many ways superior to the Macintosh of its era, or the Amiga (in same areas at least) and Atari ST.

I've always wanted one of these, I don't recall ever actually using one though. We had Apple ][s, then Upgraded to 2e's. By High School, we had moved onto 386 Intels & Windows 3.x New Sub: Dryden, Mich.

@70s80sRetroRewind

2 ай бұрын

I really enjoy mine. It's bit of a time machine for me. They pop up on FB marketplace/Offerup/CL from time to time. Prices appear to be dropping compared to a few years ago. Thanks for sharing!

in the mid to late 80s one could get C compilers that generated decent code for the MC68000 and the Intel 80286 and 80386. But the 6502 family of chips don't have reasonable support for high level languages. The generated code does awful hacky tricks to work around the deficiencies. In the late 70s and early 80s successful commercial software was written in assembly language but in the mid 80s onward, companies were shifting to writing in C. The Mac had good compilers but this IIgs, well, it's 16-bit CPU addressed greater memory access but didn't do anything to better support high level languages. Writing in assembly language had by then become frowned on due to poorer economics equation

@70s80sRetroRewind

2 ай бұрын

Thats neat background info. Thanks for sharing!

Good video. I would like to recommend some things. Do you know of the AppleSqueezer GS product? It gives you 14mhz CPU, 16mb ram (14mb available), SD card slot and the latest version has an HDMI socket on it. I also installed a fan inside the power supply (60mm x 15mm). I also installed a 4-channel surround sound output; you can connect another 4-channel output to that one for a total of eight channels. I'm also on a waitlist for a vidhd HDMI card which outputs a 1080p signal.

@70s80sRetroRewind

Ай бұрын

Thanks! Agreed, I've been eyeing the Apple Squeezer for the last year or two. (Pretty much every time I try to play Wolfenstein 3D...)

I’m impressed the plastic clips aren’t brittle at this point. Could you have upgraded the CPU to the 14MHz one you mentioned?

@70s80sRetroRewind

11 күн бұрын

Hi nunuvyurbiz123. I definitely lucked out, I haven't had as much luck with the IIe slot covers. When it comes to CPU upgrades, I'm not aware of a direct swap to 14MHz. However, we do have the TransWarp GS or more recently, the AppleSqueezer GS (I've been eyeing that one).

The last of the “Apple II”s? I thought that was the IIc+.

@70s80sRetroRewind

Ай бұрын

I stand corrected. You are right, the Apple IIc Plus was released after the GS. I keep on forgetting about that variant.

Hey! Where's your AppleSqueezer?!?!?!?! :)

@70s80sRetroRewind

3 ай бұрын

LOL, I've been eyeing that accelerator (plus). I've got a few homelab projects going on. Maybe after those have been completed.

@cathrynm

3 ай бұрын

@@70s80sRetroRewindI looked for AppleSqueezer also, but I'm not sure if they're coming back or not. They're not cheap, they look like an FPGA dev board bolted onto a custom card. I signed up for the email list, but have heard nothing.

Now you need a stereo card.

@70s80sRetroRewind

2 ай бұрын

You're absolutely right! I never understood why they would neuter the Ensoniq...

@BobDarlington

2 ай бұрын

​@@70s80sRetroRewind it's crazy they did that. There are a few on the market but I'm happy to send you one I designed. No strings.

@70s80sRetroRewind

2 ай бұрын

@@BobDarlington That would be fantastic! Then I can then get more S out of the GS. (Sorry, that was bad 🙂)

@70s80sRetroRewind

2 ай бұрын

@@BobDarlington Just let me know what's the best way to contact you with my address. Thanks!

@BobDarlington

2 ай бұрын

@@70s80sRetroRewind this is wild. I responded here several times attempting to figure out how to communicate and every response was removed.