On 31 Aug 2020, Spectre said the following...

Sorry for the confusion; my reply was from a ][gs.

Ahhhh even better.... Apple II Forever! :)

Indeed! I've had it for about a year, but just recently got around to
upgrading it. I put in a modern power supply (preventative), an 8Mb memory card, an Uthernet II network card, and a MicroDrive/Turbo IDE/CF card. I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

Jeff.
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Indeed! I've had it for about a year, but just recently got around to upgrading it. I put in a modern power supply (preventative), an 8Mb memory card, an Uthernet II network card, and a MicroDrive/Turbo IDE/CF card. I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

ROM1 or ROM3? You've got pretty much all the goodies. I'm still want to bang a SCSI card in mine mostly for nostalgic reasons, and you can hitch a CD and other things up to it as well.

The only other thing I'd consider would be a sound card, and hitch it up to a decent sound system. The cards are really basically stereo amps with a header to pick up the stereo audio straight off the mobo. On board sound is reasonable, but it is only mono at the socket.

If she is a ROM3 try hitting Ctl-OA-CA-N for an easter egg :)

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: Scrawled in haste at The Lower Planes (21:3/101)

I near forgot too... something like a Mac SE30 or Classic is a great accessory too... you pop MacOS 6.55 or 7 on them and use them as an AppleTalk fileserver.
Again ROM3 is better at it than a ROM1 but either will work, and you can actually netboot it if you're desperate and have plenty of time :) It'll give you a certain amount of TCP connectivity too, although you have the Uthernet....

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: Scrawled in haste at The Lower Planes (21:3/101)

On 01 Sep 2020, Spectre said the following...

I near forgot too... something like a Mac SE30 or Classic is a great accessory too... you pop MacOS 6.55 or 7 on them and use them as an AppleTalk fileserver. Again ROM3 is better at it than a ROM1 but either will work, and you can actually netboot it if you're desperate and have plenty of time :) It'll give you a certain amount of TCP connectivity too, although you have the Uthernet....

I would love to get my hands on one of those; they are what I first learned Pascal on, I wasn't an Apple kid back in the day; I was more into Atari
8-bits and Timex/Sinclair machines. But when I took a computer class in HS, they had Turbo Pascal on those early Macs, and the idea that one could write
a program without any line numbers whatsoever blew my young mind.

Do you happen to have any recommendations on II or IIgs RPG or strategy games with some depth to them?

Jeff.
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Atari TI-99 TRS-80
-+- Cold War Computing -+- Apple II PDP-8 Commodore -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Sinclair PDP-11 System/370

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A45 2020/02/18 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Perceptronica (21:1/180)

On 01 Sep 2020, Spectre said the following...

ROM1 or ROM3? You've got pretty much all the goodies. I'm still want
to bang a SCSI card in mine mostly for nostalgic reasons, and you can hitch a CD and other things up to it as well.

Mine is a ROM1.

The only other thing I'd consider would be a sound card, and hitch it up to a decent sound system. The cards are really basically stereo amps
with a header to pick up the stereo audio straight off the mobo. On
board sound is reasonable, but it is only mono at the socket.

I'm considering a VidHD card, if I can find one, for HDMI output. I have a cheap AV-to-HDMI adapter but honestly the picture is better using the TV's AV input. But mostly I use a little 90's JVC CRT TV that somehow gets a really good picture. I'm not sure what's sepcial about it technically, but it's definitely got something going on.

Jeff.
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Atari TI-99 TRS-80
-+- Cold War Computing -+- Apple II PDP-8 Commodore -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Sinclair PDP-11 System/370

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A45 2020/02/18 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Perceptronica (21:1/180)

I'm considering a VidHD card, if I can find one, for HDMI output. I have a cheap AV-to-HDMI adapter but honestly the picture is better using the TV's AV input. But mostly I use a little 90's JVC CRT TV that somehow
gets a really good picture. I'm not sure what's sepcial about it technically, but it's definitely got something going on.

Probably about time to ask where in the world you are? I have a VidHD and from the perspective of using your GS with any modern display it makes sense and will become more crucial in the future as other CRT options wear out or break down.

However I don't use it. I originally bought it for the GS because I didn't have the GS monitor. The results though.... good, but.... The GS video has a lot of dithering going on in it to make colours. When you blow that up to 1080p it starts to look pretty ordinary. Couple this with nothing much under about 32" for an available display, it either looks grainy or you need to sit about a kilometer away from it for it to smooth out.

I pulled it out after I was able to get my hands on a 14" AWA LCD TV with a SCART connector on it. There's a wiring diagram to get directly from the GS RGB outtput to the SCART input. The result on this really blew me away. I wasn't expecting a lot seeing as how the dithering tends to show on everything. But the video is essentially a SCART native signal combined with the small screen size make it an excellent result.

Having used said VidHD for a time after that in CloneE, I was having trouble finding a suitable mono crt monitot I landed a green screen, so thats made the card superfluous at the moment.

So in short, is the VidHD the best possible picture, no. Will it become indispensible going forward, yes.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: Scrawled in haste at The Lower Planes (21:3/101)

I'm considering a VidHD card, if I can find one, for HDMI output. I have a cheap AV-to-HDMI adapter but honestly the picture is better using the TV's AV input. But mostly I use a little 90's JVC CRT TV that somehow
gets a really good picture. I'm not sure what's sepcial about it technically, but it's definitely got something going on.

Hmmm a good composite display? Near unheard of. Usually you get wild colour fringing going on in any SHR mode. But you might have it set to mono video in the control panel. Mono gives you as clean a picture as you're going to get none of the colour flare/fringing going on. If thats the case then yep I understand the image looking better straight out without conversion.

Is it something like a Gonzo board you're feeding it through? Because they vary wildly in output quality too.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: Scrawled in haste at The Lower Planes (21:3/101)

On 09-01-20 08:35, Jeff wrote to Spectre <=-

I would love to get my hands on one of those; they are what I first learned Pascal on, I wasn't an Apple kid back in the day; I was more
into Atari 8-bits and Timex/Sinclair machines. But when I took a
computer class in HS, they had Turbo Pascal on those early Macs, and

I never knew you could get TP for the Mac in those days. I had only ever seen it on DOS and CP/M.

the idea that one could write a program without any line numbers whatsoever blew my young mind.

Do you happen to have any recommendations on II or IIgs RPG or strategy games with some depth to them?

I've never used a IIgs, but I remember drooling over them at a computer show. Never actually encountered one in the wild though. :(


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On 02 Sep 2020, Vk3jed said the following...

I never knew you could get TP for the Mac in those days. I had only
ever seen it on DOS and CP/M.

You had me doubting my memory, but there was in fact a Turbo Pascal for Mac released in 1986:
https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/1x-mac

I've never used a IIgs, but I remember drooling over them at a computer show. Never actually encountered one in the wild though. :(

Same here; my school district had Apples, but they jumped straight from the
old Apple IIs to the Macs. This is the first IIgs I've actually used.

Jeff.
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Atari TI-99 TRS-80
-+- Cold War Computing -+- Apple II PDP-8 Commodore -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Sinclair PDP-11 System/370

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A45 2020/02/18 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Perceptronica (21:1/180)

(Trying to combine Part 1 and Part 2 here.)
On 02 Sep 2020, Spectre said the following...

Probably about time to ask where in the world you are? I have a VidHD

I'm in the US, near Austin, Texas.

However I don't use it. I originally bought it for the GS because I didn't have the GS monitor. The results though.... good, but.... The GS video has a lot of dithering going on in it to make colours. When you

Weird, I thought that the VidHD card did some DMA or something to get the
video data directly from ram, so that its output was not a cleaned-up or blown-up composite signal, but a brand-new HDMI signal. Is this the card that you have?

As for the JVC CRT TV I was talking about, no, it's nowhere near perfect but close enough that text is pretty legible in 80-column/color mode. There are color splotches everywhere, definitely, but it's far better than any
flatscreen I've tried to use. It's kind of got a raster thing going on; I
can clearly see each row of pixels. I'm using it to write this, in fact, using the Spectrum telnet client.

Jeff.
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-+- Cold War Computing -+- Apple II PDP-8 Commodore -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Sinclair PDP-11 System/370

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A45 2020/02/18 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Perceptronica (21:1/180)

Spectre wrote to Jeff <=-

I near forgot too... something like a Mac SE30 or Classic is a great accessory too... you pop MacOS 6.55 or 7 on them and use them as an AppleTalk fileserver.

I worked at a company that had a SE/30 in the corner with a stack of
SCSI drives doing just that, and a Lisa with a 5 meg HD running our
mail system - under my desk.

My daily driver was a terminal and a Mac Plus with 2MB of RAM added
to it. Red Ryder terminal software and a 1200 baud modem meant I
could call BBSes when the boss wasn't looking. :)


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Vk3jed wrote to Jeff <=-

I never knew you could get TP for the Mac in those days. I had only
ever seen it on DOS and CP/M.

Lightspeed made a Pascal and C compiler, that was all I saw back
then.


... Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
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However I don't use it. I originally bought it for the

Weird, I thought that the VidHD card did some DMA or something to get
the video data directly from ram, so that its output was not a
cleaned-up or blown-up composite signal, but a brand-new HDMI signal.
Is this the card that you have?

Yes it is. The problem is not really a function of the card itself. It does what its meant to. BUT the limitations are how far you can increase the resolution of the original image and not have it become blocky, its a long way from 640x200 or 320x200 all the way to 1920x1080. So all the foibles that were hidden in a small monitor image including the original dithering are amplified in the new larger HDMI image.

Yes its all spankin' DMA and picks up the video data straight off the system bus but at the end of the day the video data is the same. You'll also need to be a bit careful in the DMA arena too. Apple II's in general are only happy with one DMA device, multiples can cause contention. So I have DMA disabled on
the MicroDrive Turbo.

Its like getting say a 320x240 QVGA image and looking at it at 1024x768SVGA you start to see the individual pixels. And QVGA doesn't have dithering going on in it either.

http://pineapple.zapto.org/gs.shtml if you scroll down to point #4 Monitot Madness there's some photos of the SCART LCD. The result is much smoother than the VidHD. On the GS orange is a dithered yellow/red/white colour. So while it looks orange on the SCART LCD, on a 1080p image it looks quite spotty.

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: (21:3/101)

I worked at a company that had a SE/30 in the corner with a stack
of SCSI drives doing just that, and a Lisa with a 5 meg HD running
our mail system - under my desk.

I was never terribly big on Macs in general. Still not... somehow they feel just that bit to hands off for me. Given all the GS software in existence will fit on 1x500Mb HD pretty much I ended up ditching the Mac server when I got a SCSI card.

I did have some interesting SCSI chains at one stage though. I had a IIe and the GS on a bench next to each other both with appropriate SCSI cards, both connected to the same SCSI chain. The default ID and ID boot direction were opposite for the two cards Rev B vs High Speed SCSI. You could access all drives but the highest and lowest id's were both boot devices depending which machine you booted. :)

In one SE/30 I had there was a HD that had stiction and never spun up. It was left there because it was supplying terminator power to the SCSI Bus. There was a second drive that would only spin up when the first was attached, both were I think Quantum ProDrive 40's. I got confused badly one day when the stuck drive suddenly let go, spun up and became the boot drive. Didn't figure it out for a while, I was hunting for something extra attached to the end of the bus and wondering where this weird OS had come from. :)

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: (21:3/101)

On 09-02-20 08:49, Jeff wrote to Vk3jed <=-

You had me doubting my memory, but there was in fact a Turbo Pascal for Mac released in 1986:
https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/1x-mac

Learn something new every day. I had never heard of it, so that's interesting.

I've never used a IIgs, but I remember drooling over them at a computer show. Never actually encountered one in the wild though. :(

Same here; my school district had Apples, but they jumped straight from the old Apple IIs to the Macs. This is the first IIgs I've actually
used.

The Macs came after I left school. By then, I was well and truly PCs at university. :)


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On 09-02-20 08:11, poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Vk3jed <=-

Vk3jed wrote to Jeff <=-

I never knew you could get TP for the Mac in those days. I had only
ever seen it on DOS and CP/M.

Lightspeed made a Pascal and C compiler, that was all I saw back
then.

Seems there was a TP from what others have said.


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On 03 Sep 2020, Vk3jed said the following...

Learn something new every day. I had never heard of it, so that's interesting.

Alas, there does not appear to be a version of TP (or TC) for the IIgs. I
did, though, buy the Orca suite from juiced.gs, which includes C and Pascal compilers, among others.

The Macs came after I left school. By then, I was well and truly PCs at university. :)

I went into the Army after school. After a brief stint using COBOL on a mainframe, I mostly worked with Unix-based machines with PCs as terminals.

Jeff.
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Atari TI-99 TRS-80
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* Origin: Perceptronica (21:1/180)

Alas, there does not appear to be a version of TP (or TC) for the IIgs. I did, though, buy the Orca suite from juiced.gs, which includes C and Pascal compilers, among others.

I think Borland was just about dead in the water by this stage if I recall right. Orca was a pretty spiffy Pascal from memory. The handbrake at the time was pretty proficient in TP, and most of the assists from her would translate directly into ORCA with no fuss.

One of the many missing things I wish I still had from them good ol' days... the whole Orca/Pascal setup and all the GS programming references... Not that I was proficient enough to do much with it.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: Scrawled in haste at The Lower Planes (21:3/101)

On 09-03-20 09:39, Jeff wrote to Vk3jed <=-

Alas, there does not appear to be a version of TP (or TC) for the IIgs.
I did, though, buy the Orca suite from juiced.gs, which includes C and Pascal compilers, among others.

Well natively, I doubt it. The only version I saw on an Apple II ran under CP/M, which meant it required a Z80 card.

The Macs came after I left school. By then, I was well and truly PCs at university. :)

I went into the Army after school. After a brief stint using COBOL on a mainframe, I mostly worked with Unix-based machines with PCs as
terminals.

Oh, OK. I went from school to university, and by the time I finished there, the PC was king.


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On 04 Sep 2020, Spectre said the following...

One of the many missing things I wish I still had from them good ol' days... the whole Orca/Pascal setup and all the GS programming references... Not that I was proficient enough to do much with it.

You can get the whole Orca suite, (soft) documentation included, for $25 from juiced.gs. If for whatever reason you want the source code to the suite
itself, that's another $15.

Jeff.
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Atari TI-99 TRS-80
-+- Cold War Computing -+- Apple II PDP-8 Commodore -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Sinclair PDP-11 System/370

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A45 2020/02/18 (Raspberry Pi/32)
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You can get the whole Orca suite, (soft) documentation included,
for $25 from juiced.gs. If for whatever reason you want the source
code to the suite itself, that's another $15.

I'm a sucker for a manual though, I think that was the most important part :) They don't supply them anymore if I recall right. Still i might be able to get someone like orrificeworks to put one together I s'pose... my printers output is a bit ratty for manual printing.

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: (21:3/101)

Spectre wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

I did have some interesting SCSI chains at one stage though. I had a
IIe and the GS on a bench next to each other both with appropriate
SCSI cards, both connected to the same SCSI chain. The default ID and
ID boot direction were opposite for the two cards Rev B vs High Speed SCSI. You could access all drives but the highest and lowest id's were both boot devices depending which machine you booted. :)

At one company, we had Mac II/IIfx systems for the creative folks,
IIcis for the technical/developer types and LCII/III for admins. The
technical types like me ended up with the entire chain filled - a
CD-ROM drive, a Syquest drive, Zip drive, external HDD and a DAT
drive - it became sort of a badge of honor. :)

That old IIci with a cache card, external video card, 16 MB of RAM
and an 80 MB drive is still one of my favorite computers, ever.

In one SE/30 I had there was a HD that had stiction and never spun up.
It was left there because it was supplying terminator power to the
SCSI Bus. There was a second drive that would only spin up when the
first was attached, both were I think Quantum ProDrive 40's. I got confused badly one day when the stuck drive suddenly let go, spun up
and became the boot drive. Didn't figure it out for a while, I was hunting for something extra attached to the end of the bus and
wondering where this weird OS had come from. :)

Quantum Fireballs used to stick, too - I recall taking one out of a
IIci, hitting it against the side of the table and making it work, to
the shock of the user watching.



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Quantum Fireballs used to stick, too - I recall taking one out of a

That ones interesting. Here they had a reputation for living up to their names and letting the smoke out... But it was the prodrive LPS models that always liked to stick. Handy hint used to be leave them out in the sun to warm up...

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
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