Atari ST vs. Apple IIgs

[Fletch]

Since there seems to be a continual Atari ST vs. Amiga thread I figured I'd mix it up and throw the IIgs into the mix.

 

Here are my quick comparisons and contrasts:

 

Atari 1040ST and IIgs both had a $999 sale price.

 

ST - 16 bit 68000 @ 8mhz - IIgs 16 bit 65C816 @ 2.8mhz

 

ST - 1 MEG STANDARD - IIgs 256 MB

 

ST - Craptastic Yamaha Sound - IIgs pretty damn fine Ensoniq

 

ST - No internal expansion - IIgs 7 internal expansion slots

 

ST - GEM Interface (pretty sweet at the time) - IIGS - Finder (very similar to the Mac's finder)

 

 

 

Personal memories - I own or have owned 520ST - Falcon030. IIGS - Used extensively at school and I had a friend who had one of those bizarre IIe's that were upgraded to the IIgs.

 

From my personal experience the ST just felt snappier. The IIgs had long load times.

 

The GUI's were pretty similar. I recall the IIgs having the ability to display more colors in the GUI than the ST.

 

The ST had way more games, but with the IIgs's ability to run almost all Apple II software the IIgs had a much larger software library.

 

Sound - there is no comparison. The IIgs blows the ST out of the water. ST sound is pretty embarrassing by comparison.

 

 

Anybody care to add?

 

Fletch

[Tom-Lynx]

Before I even finished reading your post I was thinking about the long GS load times. I loved the GS and we had hundreds of Apple IIe programs, so it was a natural upgrade for us at the time. However, we never had the benefit of a hard disk and it was still the same old floppy shuffle.

 

The GUI interface on the Apple IIGS was just like a Mac, but the icons were more vertically stretched and it was slooooww.

 

Rather than waiting all the time for the GUI interface and creating documents in Appleworks for the GS, we ended up always using the older Appleworks IIe / IIc version, which was text based and very snappy.

[+save2600]

I liked the external keyboard, look and backwards compatibility of the GS. Really wish they would have exploited that system. Apple really dropped the ball on that back in the day. Seems to me it was hardly supported. The GS *should* have been the Mac of the time. The processor is the only thing that kept me from taking the system seriously. Apples to Fuji (ha!) comparison, I know -but still. Had Apple let the system mature, what processors would have been available where they could have let it evolve whilst maintaining compatibility? They knew it was a dead-end system. Too bad they whet our appetites and then pulled the rug completely out from under us Not unlike what the C128 was for Commodore. That might make a better comparison than the ST that way.

[TwiliteZoner]

Since there seems to be a continual Atari ST vs. Amiga thread I figured I'd mix it up and throw the IIgs into the mix.

 

Here are my quick comparisons and contrasts:

 

Atari 1040ST and IIgs both had a $999 sale price.

 

ST - 16 bit 68000 @ 8mhz - IIgs 16 bit 65C816 @ 2.8mhz

 

ST - 1 MEG STANDARD - IIgs 256 MB

 

ST - Craptastic Yamaha Sound - IIgs pretty damn fine Ensoniq

 

ST - No internal expansion - IIgs 7 internal expansion slots

 

ST - GEM Interface (pretty sweet at the time) - IIGS - Finder (very similar to the Mac's finder)

 

 

 

Personal memories - I own or have owned 520ST - Falcon030. IIGS - Used extensively at school and I had a friend who had one of those bizarre IIe's that were upgraded to the IIgs.

 

From my personal experience the ST just felt snappier. The IIgs had long load times.

 

The GUI's were pretty similar. I recall the IIgs having the ability to display more colors in the GUI than the ST.

 

The ST had way more games, but with the IIgs's ability to run almost all Apple II software the IIgs had a much larger software library.

 

Sound - there is no comparison. The IIgs blows the ST out of the water. ST sound is pretty embarrassing by comparison.

 

 

Anybody care to add?

 

Fletch

 

I think a fisher price xylophone had an ST beat on sound. That said, the IIGS had the Amiga beat on sound as well.

Edited December 12, 2009 by TwiliteZoner

[LoTonah]

As far as I remember, System 5 didn't ship at the same time that the GS did, meaning that all people had for the first little while was a fancier Apple //e.

 

I love both the ST and the GS, and it seems like they had some similar problems... initially buggy OS's, late and incomplete programming environments, and a lack of follow-through on promised hardware and software upgrades from both companies.

 

I was thinking the other day... what would have happened if they had decided to go with the Apple //x project and the Mac had been shelved? Would the Apple // still be a dominant force in the marketplace, extended and evolved?

[atarian63]

all I do know is that it was pretty much a joke. Schools bought them, consumers did not. It was the ugly step child stuck betwwen the craptastic Apple II and the superior mac. Not saying it was bad, but vs ST or Amiga, it never really stood a chance. As for Library, you cant really count the old apple stuff.

[kool kitty89]

Umm, I think you meant 256 kB. And I think the base model could be either 256k or 1 MB (or maybe that was something they changed later on). And the ST of course, was initially released with 512 kB. (or 256 kB with the somewhat obscure European 260ST)

 

The ST had the price advantage too. The IIgs did indeed have a larger color palette (12-bit RGB like the Amiga) and pretty awesome sound hardware, would have been great for games if they didn't have to be software driven (I don't think it had hardware sprites, line scrolling, and I'm not sure about character modes) and with a relatively underpowered CPU. (had it been 4+ MHz initially it might have been OK, or had some hardware acceleration -ie blitter-)

 

The sound, color, and backwards compatibility (and price point I think) did give some advantanges over the MAC, but the farily weak CPU (some were only 1 MHz?) combined with limited support didn't allow it to really go anywhere.

[carmel_andrews]

Wasn't commodore slating the C128 as a direct competitor to the Atari ST

Edited December 14, 2009 by carmel_andrews

[oky2000]

Wasn't commodore slating the C128 as a direct competitor to the Atari ST

 

Not really. Magazines did make an issue of comparing the 260ST/130ST and the C128 however. I can scan in a specific article from Personal Computer World if anyone is interested?

 

 

RE: CPUs the ST had a 16/32bit CPU @ 8mhz. The IIGS had an 8/16bit CPU. Major difference really, and why the IIGS Finder ran slower than the Mac Finder given that it effectively had to only manipulate one bitplane and had 10x the CPU grunt (as did the ST)

 

The sound hardware in the IIGS was designed by Bob Yannes of MOS Technology fame (designer of the SID chip)

 

As for the games issue, Apple II/IIc/IIe games were rubbish, it would be like an ST running VCS games (of no real interest to the general public who bought an ST/IIGS to run ST/IIGS games)

 

IIGS is still better than a Mac, overpriced however as usual with all Apple computers from the first Apple 1 to the latest Macbooks

[+save2600]

 

Not really. Magazines did make an issue of comparing the 260ST/130ST and the C128 however. I can scan in a specific article from Personal Computer World if anyone is interested?

 

Yes please. I'd love to see that

[monzamess]

The sound hardware in the IIGS was designed by Bob Yannes of MOS Technology fame (designer of the SID chip)

 

Cool, I did not know that.

 

As for the games issue, Apple II/IIc/IIe games were rubbish, it would be like an ST running VCS games (of no real interest to the general public who bought an ST/IIGS to run ST/IIGS games)

 

Really? Wouldn't it be more like an ST running Atari 8-bit games? (which it can't do well)

 

And would you really call all Apple 8-bit games rubbish? Come on. Anyway, backward compatibility was (and is) a big deal. I agree no sane person would buy a //gs just to run //e games, but it was a nice feature and opened up a huge library of (non-rubbish) games.

[kool kitty89]

RE: CPUs the ST had a 16/32bit CPU @ 8mhz. The IIGS had an 8/16bit CPU. Major difference really, and why the IIGS Finder ran slower than the Mac Finder given that it effectively had to only manipulate one bitplane and had 10x the CPU grunt (as did the ST)

Aren't there trade-offs between the 68k and 650x (or enhanced architecture of the C02 and 816 in particular) that don't make comparisons based on clock speed alone completely valid?

I do wonder why they didn't opt for a faster varient of the 816 though, maybe it just wasn't available at the time or too expensive perhaps? (though the next year NEC was using a 8 MHz rated 65C02 variant in their PC Engine console) I guess that's the same kind of mystery as to why the SNES went with such a slowly clocked version as well. (though moreso there since that was 1990)

 

Anyway, even with a slow CPU, hardware acceleration (ie a blitter) would have largely addresed the speed issues (and also made it much better for games and compared to the Amiga overall). Perhaps they didn't want to invest that much into it, or it's possible Apple wanted to intentionally limit its capabilites relative to the Macintosh. (didn't they do that with some of their late 680x0 based MACs to make the PPC ones more attractive?) The latter wouldn't have been an issue of course, has the IIgs been the Macintosh so to speak.

[TwiliteZoner]

Wasn't commodore slating the C128 as a direct competitor to the Atari ST

 

Not really. Magazines did make an issue of comparing the 260ST/130ST and the C128 however. I can scan in a specific article from Personal Computer World if anyone is interested?

 

 

RE: CPUs the ST had a 16/32bit CPU @ 8mhz. The IIGS had an 8/16bit CPU. Major difference really, and why the IIGS Finder ran slower than the Mac Finder given that it effectively had to only manipulate one bitplane and had 10x the CPU grunt (as did the ST)

 

The sound hardware in the IIGS was designed by Bob Yannes of MOS Technology fame (designer of the SID chip)

 

As for the games issue, Apple II/IIc/IIe games were rubbish, it would be like an ST running VCS games (of no real interest to the general public who bought an ST/IIGS to run ST/IIGS games)

 

IIGS is still better than a Mac, overpriced however as usual with all Apple computers from the first Apple 1 to the latest Macbooks

 

I didn't know that Yannes co-founded Ensoniq. I guess he really outsidded himself with the IIGS.

[R.Cade]

I don't know. Maybe the sound was better "on paper" than the Amiga, but I never heard anything that sounded even remotely close to "better than the Amiga" sound. Probably the CPU speed or the interface to the sound system crippled it somehow.

 

I recall a friend had one and got Marble Madness with it. We compared it to the Amiga version and there was no contest. Amiga version was faster and had better graphics and sound.

 

What is an example of a great sounding program on the IIgs? I have one and can break it out.

[monzamess]

I am also interested... any good Youtube //gs videos? (yeah I've looked, I guess I'm dumb)

 

I was intrigued by the //gs sound specs when it came out but I have never had a good listen to its capabilities after all this time.

[atarian63]

I don't know. Maybe the sound was better "on paper" than the Amiga, but I never heard anything that sounded even remotely close to "better than the Amiga" sound. Probably the CPU speed or the interface to the sound system crippled it somehow.

 

I recall a friend had one and got Marble Madness with it. We compared it to the Amiga version and there was no contest. Amiga version was faster and had better graphics and sound.

 

What is an example of a great sounding program on the IIgs? I have one and can break it out.

The Amiga version is the very finest next to the actual arcade and was a showcase game on the Amiga.

[kool kitty89]

I don't know. Maybe the sound was better "on paper" than the Amiga, but I never heard anything that sounded even remotely close to "better than the Amiga" sound. Probably the CPU speed or the interface to the sound system crippled it somehow.

 

I recall a friend had one and got Marble Madness with it. We compared it to the Amiga version and there was no contest. Amiga version was faster and had better graphics and sound.

 

What is an example of a great sounding program on the IIgs? I have one and can break it out.

The Amiga version is the very finest next to the actual arcade and was a showcase game on the Amiga.

 

The Genesis version looks like it might be closer than the Amiga one, sound is off on both, Amiga seems to be using samples from the arcade YM2151 to some extent and genesis is using a rather mediocre sound engine. (music could be almost identical to arcade as the sound chip has 6 4-op FM channels to the Arcade's 8 plus the 3 sq wave+noise channels of the PSG to sumpliment the FM -which should be fine to make up the 2 missing channels -some of the arcade's sounds are sq waves anyway)

 

(Genesis)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCrcJQ-9-xk (Amiga)

(Arcade) Edited December 17, 2009 by kool kitty89

[oky2000]

The sound hardware in the IIGS was designed by Bob Yannes of MOS Technology fame (designer of the SID chip)

 

Cool, I did not know that.

 

As for the games issue, Apple II/IIc/IIe games were rubbish, it would be like an ST running VCS games (of no real interest to the general public who bought an ST/IIGS to run ST/IIGS games)

 

Really? Wouldn't it be more like an ST running Atari 8-bit games? (which it can't do well)

 

And would you really call all Apple 8-bit games rubbish? Come on. Anyway, backward compatibility was (and is) a big deal. I agree no sane person would buy a //gs just to run //e games, but it was a nice feature and opened up a huge library of (non-rubbish) games.

 

Ahh the difference is the A8 has a slightly better sound chip, hardware scrolling, overscan compared to the ST whereas the IIgs has all the necessary hardware as the II/IIc/IIe etc so it's more like a Commodore 128 running a C64 game....has all the legacy functionality and then some. The ST vs A8 is not a good comparison (see thread in 8bit forum)

 

*relatively rubbish compared to the features of the IIgs hardware I mean, if you bought a game for the Falcon and it used ST game-engine you wouldn't be very happy no? There are some good IIe games like Skyfox and RoF etc...but I'd rather have a IIgs specific version of Gauntlet say.

[oky2000]

Wasn't commodore slating the C128 as a direct competitor to the Atari ST

 

Not really. Magazines did make an issue of comparing the 260ST/130ST and the C128 however. I can scan in a specific article from Personal Computer World if anyone is interested?

 

 

RE: CPUs the ST had a 16/32bit CPU @ 8mhz. The IIGS had an 8/16bit CPU. Major difference really, and why the IIGS Finder ran slower than the Mac Finder given that it effectively had to only manipulate one bitplane and had 10x the CPU grunt (as did the ST)

 

The sound hardware in the IIGS was designed by Bob Yannes of MOS Technology fame (designer of the SID chip)

 

As for the games issue, Apple II/IIc/IIe games were rubbish, it would be like an ST running VCS games (of no real interest to the general public who bought an ST/IIGS to run ST/IIGS games)

 

IIGS is still better than a Mac, overpriced however as usual with all Apple computers from the first Apple 1 to the latest Macbooks

 

I didn't know that Yannes co-founded Ensoniq. I guess he really outsidded himself with the IIGS.

 

Yannes was rail-roaded into going to full production on a chip he considered unfinished, there was 50-100% more space available on dye which would have meant something like a five-six channel SID with greater filter and ADSR controls, more phase accumulator inter-dependancy...basically a mini Korg MS10 with 8bit resolution rough and ready sound had he been allowed to finish off his personal ideas. This is why he left MOS/CBM pretty much after the C64 was finished and went off to start Ensoniq. The guy was a genius....if SID was his rough first attempt at a value sound chip....... But then we wouldn't have sample playback either for a virtual 4th channel as in the 6581 either

 

I'm not sure but I think it's a similar story with the VIC-II designer too...but don't quote me on that!

[oky2000]

RE: CPUs the ST had a 16/32bit CPU @ 8mhz. The IIGS had an 8/16bit CPU. Major difference really, and why the IIGS Finder ran slower than the Mac Finder given that it effectively had to only manipulate one bitplane and had 10x the CPU grunt (as did the ST)

Aren't there trade-offs between the 68k and 650x (or enhanced architecture of the C02 and 816 in particular) that don't make comparisons based on clock speed alone completely valid?

I do wonder why they didn't opt for a faster varient of the 816 though, maybe it just wasn't available at the time or too expensive perhaps? (though the next year NEC was using a 8 MHz rated 65C02 variant in their PC Engine console) I guess that's the same kind of mystery as to why the SNES went with such a slowly clocked version as well. (though moreso there since that was 1990)

 

Anyway, even with a slow CPU, hardware acceleration (ie a blitter) would have largely addresed the speed issues (and also made it much better for games and compared to the Amiga overall). Perhaps they didn't want to invest that much into it, or it's possible Apple wanted to intentionally limit its capabilites relative to the Macintosh. (didn't they do that with some of their late 680x0 based MACs to make the PPC ones more attractive?) The latter wouldn't have been an issue of course, has the IIgs been the Macintosh so to speak.

 

It's pretty well known that at Apple Steve Jobs evangelised the Mac team and positively spat on the IIgs team (Wozniak's brainchild) so it became the unloved child of Apple. It was a parallel development with isolated engineering groups (stupid I know)

 

There really is no contest between the 65816 and the 68000 as per ST...they had to choose the 816 for the II/IIe 6502 compatibility modes (hence the 1mhz reduced clockspeed mode built in). The 68008 is more of a direct comparison to the 65816 really and even @ 20mhz the 65816 is not 3x more powerful than a 68000 (this is the core of the C64 Super-CPU add-on).

 

I will stick my neck out and say the IIgs is somewhere inbetween the C128 and the 520STM in raw CPU speed and C128 and Amiga in terms of custom chips. The soundchip being the notable exception...there was an Ensoniq sound card for the IIe I believe though already before the IIgs.

[oky2000]

I don't know. Maybe the sound was better "on paper" than the Amiga, but I never heard anything that sounded even remotely close to "better than the Amiga" sound. Probably the CPU speed or the interface to the sound system crippled it somehow.

 

I recall a friend had one and got Marble Madness with it. We compared it to the Amiga version and there was no contest. Amiga version was faster and had better graphics and sound.

 

What is an example of a great sounding program on the IIgs? I have one and can break it out.

 

The Amiga sound chip is unique and different, but it's strength lies in it's flexibility. Total number of sound channels = how much CPU time do you want to throw at it. It's quite possible to get high quality 6 channel sound and very acceptable 8 channel sound on the Amiga. All you have is 4 DACs wired to 4 DMA channels routed to two phono outputs. Given a clean sample used as an instrument (which can be absolutely anything...a poor man's Fairlight or Emulator II sample based synth if you like) you can get very unique results difficult to replicate on waveform based sound chips.

 

Both are great in their own way, very hard to give an objective non-emotional view on the sound hardware...miles better than the ST YM chip though for sure.

 

The IIgs however is a wavetable type soundcard (Gravis Ultrasound for Mac II/PC?) and for reasons only Apple know the stereo sound chip was crippled with a hardwired mono-only output. 8 voices with 3 oscillators per voice and part digital part analogue in design...and created by Bob Yannes just 2 years after SID..so like I said it is like comparing the SID to Amiga's Paula.

 

edit: this is the best I could find for sound effects on a game on the IIgs

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsPFB_9igK0&feature=channel

 

Hmm here is an example of what I mean..King's Quest 3 on IIgs and Amiga....now the Amiga version has had zero effort put into the samples so sounds a bit crap (garbage in garbage out as far as Paula music is concerned) but they are using the built in 'instruments' of the IIgs Ensoniq chip which obviously sound better.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyGOiOkjbZ4

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkAgq4JHbW8

 

zany golf is a lot closer and more difficult to tell which machine is playing which video.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNISV7uLLc8&feature=related

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY3pHefOnEc

 

You get the idea anyway...especially as the STE uses a two channel version of the Amiga technology to play sampled sounds etc. What I don't know (and is important) is how the sample playback works on the Ensoniq...can you easily sample a 2mb sound and stream it simply to the audio hardware or are the sample sizes restrictive on the Ensoniq chip making it less flexible as a custom music/SFX system outside the built in wavetable sounds and effect? Hmmmm that affects DMA/CPU bandwidth significantly if it is too small a sample size in kb.

Edited December 17, 2009 by oky2000

[oky2000]

The IIgs is definitely superior to the ST/STE if this video is indeed running at original speed and not speeded up.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNcuXo3owi4

 

Personally I doubt that is the actual speed (the samples are out of pitch and played about double speed and the health bar goes down 2x faster than the Amiga version so I doubt it. Even so, the ST could not do the Amiga version let alone this version at this alleged turn of speed.

 

Now who was it that said there are no IIgs vids on youtube?

 

edit: I call bullshit on that video, there are more than 16 colours per scanline, and nowhere on the entire internet is there any mention of any hardware assistance remotely like the Amiga chipset, the IIgs VGC (video graphics controller) is only assigned some trick colour palette positioning and screen mode upgrades from the IIe capabilities. A 2.8mhz 65816 simply can not shift as much data as Agnus or STE blitter, Agnus was benchmarked by Byte/PCW magazines to be effectively shifting the pixels of a 70mhz 68000 on a standard ST.

 

FAKE!

 

edit 2: The IIgs is fascinating now...really should get on with my work!

 

Anyway....to play samples on the IIgs it can only use a dedicated 64kb block for ALL samples...ie all 8 stereo voices. So effectively to even play a 2 channel sample in an identical way to the Amiga you need to keep spooling the 64kb of sample data via CPU LDA STA type rubbish from main memory. This is a severe bottleneck and CPU hog and this makes the Amiga soundchip superior for sound effects or unique tunes with custom instruments.

 

Not sure about the STE....can the STE's 2channel DAC access all memory in the ST's main memory...via DMA? Do you just assign start and end points of sample data in ram and tell it to start playing them independantly? I'm pretty sure it's not as restrictive as the IIgs for sample playback (but again far superior compared to the YM chip waveforms of course)

Edited December 17, 2009 by oky2000

[kool kitty89]

There really is no contest between the 65816 and the 68000 as per ST...they had to choose the 816 for the II/IIe 6502 compatibility modes (hence the 1mhz reduced clockspeed mode built in). The 68008 is more of a direct comparison to the 65816 really and even @ 20mhz the 65816 is not 3x more powerful than a 68000 (this is the core of the C64 Super-CPU add-on).

A 20 MHz 816 would be less than 3x as poweful as an 8 MHz 68000? (I also got the impression previpously, that the 68008 pretty much lost the advantages the 68k has over the 816, albeit still better than a 8088)

 

Now who was it that said there are no IIgs vids on youtube?

 

edit: I call bullshit on that video, there are more than 16 colours per scanline, and nowhere on the entire internet is there any mention of any hardware assistance remotely like the Amiga chipset, the IIgs VGC (video graphics controller) is only assigned some trick colour palette positioning and screen mode upgrades from the IIe capabilities. A 2.8mhz 65816 simply can not shift as much data as Agnus or STE blitter, Agnus was benchmarked by Byte/PCW magazines to be effectively shifting the pixels of a 70mhz 68000 on a standard ST.

 

Silpheed for the IIgs is on Youtube, not sure how useful that one is though. (looks better than the EGA version -possibly PC-8801 original- and sounds better than any but MT-32 on PC, maybe better than the PC8801's YM2203 rendition as well)

 

Anyway....to play samples on the IIgs it can only use a dedicated 64kb block for ALL samples...ie all 8 stereo voices. So effectively to even play a 2 channel sample in an identical way to the Amiga you need to keep spooling the 64kb of sample data via CPU LDA STA type rubbish from main memory. This is a severe bottleneck and CPU hog and this makes the Amiga soundchip superior for sound effects or unique tunes with custom instruments.

 

So, much like the SNES's 64 kB of SRAM for audio (granted samples are stored compressed plus you can load other samples from ROM and switch to different samples), maybe the Sega CD's sound RAM set-up is closer to the IIgs's.

Edited December 17, 2009 by kool kitty89

[marvio]

The IIgs is definitely superior to the ST/STE if this video is indeed running at original speed and not speeded up.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNcuXo3owi4

 

Personally I doubt that is the actual speed (the samples are out of pitch and played about double speed and the health bar goes down 2x faster than the Amiga version so I doubt it. Even so, the ST could not do the Amiga version let alone this version at this alleged turn of speed.

 

Now who was it that said there are no IIgs vids on youtube?

 

edit: I call bullshit on that video, there are more than 16 colours per scanline, and nowhere on the entire internet is there any mention of any hardware assistance remotely like the Amiga chipset, the IIgs VGC (video graphics controller) is only assigned some trick colour palette positioning and screen mode upgrades from the IIe capabilities. A 2.8mhz 65816 simply can not shift as much data as Agnus or STE blitter, Agnus was benchmarked by Byte/PCW magazines to be effectively shifting the pixels of a 70mhz 68000 on a standard ST.

 

FAKE!

 

edit 2: The IIgs is fascinating now...really should get on with my work!

 

Anyway....to play samples on the IIgs it can only use a dedicated 64kb block for ALL samples...ie all 8 stereo voices. So effectively to even play a 2 channel sample in an identical way to the Amiga you need to keep spooling the 64kb of sample data via CPU LDA STA type rubbish from main memory. This is a severe bottleneck and CPU hog and this makes the Amiga soundchip superior for sound effects or unique tunes with custom instruments.

 

Not sure about the STE....can the STE's 2channel DAC access all memory in the ST's main memory...via DMA? Do you just assign start and end points of sample data in ram and tell it to start playing them independantly? I'm pretty sure it's not as restrictive as the IIgs for sample playback (but again far superior compared to the YM chip waveforms of course)

WOW!

I consider myself somewhat of a GS freak but I had never seen that game!!!

 

Will look for it and run on my GS, I have a ZIPGS installed, but I can disable that to run the game, can even run a comparison between Accelerated and NON, the My zipGS is stock tough, so it's only running at 14mhz anyway

 

Edit:

 

HA! it turns out I already had it! It was unreleased for the GS, at one point I just downloaded the complete archive of GS games + APSS and haven't gone throuugh the whole thing yet; Stay tuned! I'll post videos

Edited December 18, 2009 by marvio

[kool kitty89]

The IIgs however is a wavetable type soundcard (Gravis Ultrasound for Mac II/PC?) and for reasons only Apple know the stereo sound chip was crippled with a hardwired mono-only output. 8 voices with 3 oscillators per voice and part digital part analogue in design...and created by Bob Yannes just 2 years after SID..so like I said it is like comparing the SID to Amiga's Paula.

Wait, 8-channels? It's got 32, except they're stuck paired as 16 stereo channels which only output as mono stock (add-on card required for stereo), but that's still 16 voices. (15 with one reserved for the OS, but I seem to remember that that wouldn't apply to games and such which bypass the OS)

And wasn't it entirely RAM based for sample storage, unlike most/all PC wavetable cards with hardcoded samples (sometimes in addition to sample RAM)

 

Hmm here is an example of what I mean..King's Quest 3 on IIgs and Amiga....now the Amiga version has had zero effort put into the samples so sounds a bit crap (garbage in garbage out as far as Paula music is concerned) but they are using the built in 'instruments' of the IIgs Ensoniq chip which obviously sound better.

Heh, sounds like they were trying to imitate the ST sound chip's square waves, kind of a neat sound though, not bad actually, the IIgs's samples are still better though of course.

You get the idea anyway...especially as the STE uses a two channel version of the Amiga technology to play sampled sounds etc. What I don't know (and is important) is how the sample playback works on the Ensoniq...can you easily sample a 2mb sound and stream it simply to the audio hardware or are the sample sizes restrictive on the Ensoniq chip making it less flexible as a custom music/SFX system outside the built in wavetable sounds and effect? Hmmmm that affects DMA/CPU bandwidth significantly if it is too small a sample size in kb.

 

I rather like the sound of the IIgs's Zany Golf, quite a bit more than the Amiga from those videos at least. (more energy, sounded like more channels simultaneously, and crisper sound -less muddy/staticky -I'd assume due to higher sample rate)