I was born in 1982, and as far as I can remember we had an Apple IIgs in our house. We had two 5.25" floppies, a 3.5" floppy, an Image Writer II, and a stock "Woz" IIgs. It never had fancy RAM upgrades, or anything. We just used it. Some of my favorite things to do with the machine was to run "Dungeon Master" on it, or "The Last Ninja" or play around with "Music Studio". I learned how to spell using "Speller Bee" in fact I still clearly remember starting up Speller bee, and hearing it say: "Speller Bee, by First Byte" in that weird computerized voice that it did. We used the IIgs up-until about 1993. It was about that time that we had migrated almost entirely onto macs. In 1994 we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and the IIgs never got set up in the new house. It just sat in the garage doing nothing. My last two years of High School I had a teacher, Mr. Bright, He was an english teacher, who had an affection for the old IIgs' he still requested stay in his class. Mind you this was 1998-1999-2000, so the IIgs being used in a classroom was not the most commonly seen thing. He was happy with the systems, but wanted a system he could do work with at home. My parents, being the nice people they are "gave" the whole kit and caboodle software and all, to him for $20. Here it is, more than 5 years after the fact, and I want my system back. after a long 10 year stint in the dark side (win-tel) I've come home to Apple. I own numerous macintosh. I have a 1.25GHz eMac, a 500MHz G3 B&W PowerMac, I have a PowerMac 6500/225 soon to be 300MHz! And I have three PowerBook 540c laptops and I have the new fourth generation iPod 20GB. I'm thoroughly planted as a full apple enthusiast, and plan on staying this way for quite possibly the rest of my life. But like in the Movie, Citizen Kane, I wanted my RoseBud. I wanted my old IIgs back, I want to play the game I grew up on. So I went to eBay, where a man could find anything in the world, and found a IIgs system. I'm usually a careful ebay purchaser, but I was so caught up in the moment that I bid on the first system I came across. This is what I won:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=5110644419
What you see there is the extent of what I own. Although I have not received it yet. I am now in the search for many other items that would improve upon the system's performance. I downloaded from Apple GS/OS 6.0.1, and I've found my way to the fairway, where I downloaded a ton of games that I remember as a youth. But I'm interested in expanding memory, getting a 3.5" drive, maybe even getting a hard drive. I'd love to hook it up to my mac net somehow. I have a couple mac's with apple talk ports, so I think I may be able to hook it up that way. I'd love to soupe it up too. So any help from you guys would be greatly appreciated. I'm extremely novice when it comes to the IIgs. I just remember putting in a disk, and playing the game! Maybe if you guys had some hardware that was available for sale it would be cool too! Thanks for the help you guys will undoubtedly give me in the near future!
The FAQ at http://home.swbell.net/rubywand/A2FAQs5MAINHALL.html will answer a lot of your questions
There's a card that allows you to use a Compact Flash as a hard drive available at http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c=projects/CFforAppleII/main.php
A 4mb hard drive is available new at http://garberstreet.netfirms.com/
Wayne
could I use two of those 4MB RAM-4-GS cards in my system at once? Additionally, should I go with the CF Hard drive, or a standard IDE drive? Also, it seems like the largest partitions availible are 32MB, is that what the limit is on drive size with the IIgs?
The 4mb card fits in the memory expansion slot of which there is one . Still 4mb is lots on a IIgs.
Personally I'd do with the CF. Another option that I forgot about is http://www.allelec.com
they may have some of their blank Focus drive cards available. THe Focus is card that's made to use a 2.5" ide hard drive. Unfortunately Alltech has had difficulty aquiring lots of suitable hard drives so their out of prebuilt units. They also sold 8mb RAMcards
A IIgs has to boot off a ProDOS partition. ProDOS originally came out when 32mb was a huge hard drive. Once booted a IIgs can use HFS with any GSOS applications. Many people also use 8 bit ProDOS apps which are limited the ProDOS partitions. You can have several ProDOS partitions. Most people use a few ProDOS partitions and 1 HFS partition.
The CFFA card is made without any onboard ram so the partitions are hard coded via some jumpers which give you a few partitioning choices.
If you are thinking about addind a CD-ROM or Zip drive getting a SCSI card off eBay might be a better choice.
Wayne
IIRC, allelec has maybe a half dozen FocusDrives in stock, with no plans to make more. If you want one, order soon!
I think they have 8 MB Sirius cards for around $100 (finding Apple II stuff on their site is terrible - just call). You'll be hard pressed finding a use for the second 8 MB.
On my IIgs, I use a SCSI card with a 700 MB Quantum HD and a CD-ROM. I have the HD partitioned into a couple of 32 MB ProDOS partitions and one big HFS partition. I like to keep the programs I'm running on the ProDOS partitions and archives and the like on the HFS (I'm using nowhere near 700 MB). I also have a removable-media drive that can read both 1.4 MB disks and 120 MB media (forget the name of it - I can look if you're interested). I've had a lot of trouble getting it working, but in theory it could save you a slot, since it goes on the SCSI chain.
For networking, you might consider a LanceGS ethernet card. Around $130, I believe, and you can't do AppleTalk over it, but it can do TCP/IP and ftp. Not worth the expense if you're just doing to do a few transfers, but putting your IIgs on the local network, with internet access, could be awfully convenient!
I just bought the CF drive controller! I'll be investing in one of those 4MB RAM-4-GS cards. I figure, if I can run GS/OS 6.0.1 on that much memory just fine, I'll be good! It turns out that the IIgs that I Bought is a ROM 01
but thats okay, I'll keep my eyes open for a 03!
On a side note, my monitor seems to be acting sortta funky. It flickers ever so slightly. and then today it flickerd mondo, and then it went out! I turned it off, and then turnd it on and it still was out! so I gave it a light whack with my hand and it came back on! I'm already figureing to get a new one, but maybe it's repairable?
- Jonathan
I too am a IIGS fan. I have a Rom3 gs, monitor 2 3.5's & 2 5.25's, SCSI card w/80mb drive in a *crate* enclosure, Zip Accelerator , Echo II card & apple's *official* cooling fan.
If you're interested I have a spare 3.5 that I'd be willing to part with, possibly another 5.25 & an extra Apple Hi-Speed SCSI card too. Let me know if you're interested in any or all of the above. DBear1987@yahoo.com
If people are trying to order the 4 meg ram cards from Garberstreet you need to wait a little while as Bill is currently in the hospital. I designed the card for Bill but he handles all production and sales so any purchases must be made through him. Still, I think it is worth the wait as they are quite a bit cheaper than what other 4 Meg cards sell for.
Cheers,
Vince
Yes, I agree, there are worth the wait. I hope bill gets better soon!
Just curious but what do you guys do with your IIGS these days, besides re-playing Bard's Tale, King's Quest, Thexder, or other games? I don't know how many hours I poured into the Bard's Tale series. Too bad the Bard's Tale for PS2 isn't as much fun...
Well I Use my GS to check my e-mail / Do some Telnet browsing / chatting and play games.