Atari ST vs. Apple IIgs

[carmel_andrews]

If memory recalls, the 68008 was a cut down version of the 68000 (namely limited mem. addressing)

 

where as the 65816 had no built in limitations and if you think about it, having a built in 6502 mode actually sold the processor (shame that the likes of cbm or atari never used it) after all, i recall that the 68000 doesn't have a 6800 or 6809 mode i guess because unlike the 6502, very few machines used the processor (s), dragon data machines is the only 'popular' system i recalled that used a 6809

Edited December 18, 2009 by carmel_andrews

[frogstar_robot]

i recall that the 68000 doesn't have a 6800 or 6809 mode i guess because unlike the 6502, very few machines used the processor (s), dragon data machines is the only 'popular' system i recalled that used a 6809

 

Radio Shack's Color Computer line used 6809s.

 

....It turns out the Dragons are British variants of the CoCos. Other countries made variants as well.

Edited December 18, 2009 by frogstar_robot

[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.

 

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)

Interesting stuff. The Amiga controll is a mouse which is much more like the arcade. The genesis and others used a gamepad which really makes the game fail.

[carmel_andrews]

CoCo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cocoa, nah...I prefer Hot Chocolate

[Fletch]

I've been messing around with a bunch of IIgs games in emulation over the past week and I must say that this system is really under appreciated. I was inspired enough to purchase a IIgs on eBay this week. The variety of software available is rather impressive. Here is a site that has a nice sampling of titles http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/.

 

I am looking forward to spending some time with the old beast when she arrives during the holiday.

 

Fletch

[oky2000]

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)

 

It has 32 oscillators which are paired up to make 8 stereo channels but as the IIgs is hardwired to output only mono and you need either soldering skills or an adaptor card to get stereo sound output = 8 channels mono no? officially it is classed as an 8 note polyphonic stereo chip. I think 8/16 stereo/mono is where the confusion results in the 16 channels and 16 stereo channels perhaps. Still 64kb of user sample memory for all channels anyway. Need to research this more.

 

The quality of the wavetable instruments is indeed rather excellent I agree Reminds me a lot of the AWE32 and Gravis Ultrasound PC cards from the 90s. It is the same chip as two professional Ensoniq synthesizers use.

[oky2000]

I've been messing around with a bunch of IIgs games in emulation over the past week and I must say that this system is really under appreciated. I was inspired enough to purchase a IIgs on eBay this week. The variety of software available is rather impressive. Here is a site that has a nice sampling of titles http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/.

 

I am looking forward to spending some time with the old beast when she arrives during the holiday.

 

Fletch

 

I never found a reliable Windows IIgs emulator last year and found some of the disk images on that website for IIgs stuff corrupt. Anyone know of a reliable IIgs Windows emulator...I spent about a week on this and then gave up to be honest. Wouldn't mind seeing Gauntlet IIgs specific version running.

[oky2000]

If memory recalls, the 68008 was a cut down version of the 68000 (namely limited mem. addressing)

 

where as the 65816 had no built in limitations and if you think about it, having a built in 6502 mode actually sold the processor (shame that the likes of cbm or atari never used it) after all, i recall that the 68000 doesn't have a 6800 or 6809 mode i guess because unlike the 6502, very few machines used the processor (s), dragon data machines is the only 'popular' system i recalled that used a 6809

 

The 68008 is just an 8bit external bus version of the 68000, it's pretty much crippled really, the Sinclair QL uses one. It's a strange combination...32bit internal and 8bit external.

 

The reason the 68000 didn't really use a 6800 legacy mode is probably because they wanted a moveable stack pointer? (necessary for a multi-tasking OS) and basically they wanted to design a new CPU without restrictions...hence it is the best choice for 16bit machines compared to the 8086.

[kool kitty89]

(Genesis)

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

(Arcade)

Interesting stuff. The Amiga controll is a mouse which is much more like the arcade. The genesis and others used a gamepad which really makes the game fail.

 

Well, unless thay added support for the Sega mouse... (which of course didn't come until later) Intersting to note that the homebrew Wolf3D for the 32x is going to have mouse support.

 

It has 32 oscillators which are paired up to make 8 stereo channels but as the IIgs is hardwired to output only mono and you need either soldering skills or an adaptor card to get stereo sound output = 8 channels mono no? officially it is classed as an 8 note polyphonic stereo chip. I think 8/16 stereo/mono is where the confusion results in the 16 channels and 16 stereo channels perhaps. Still 64kb of user sample memory for all channels anyway. Need to research this more.

Oh, so there are 32 individual oscilators, with 2 per voice, making 16 voices which are then paired into stereo but mixed to mono, making 8 voices. (or 8 stereo voices with an add-on) Did I get that right?

I'd gotten the impression from the summary of the DOC chip on wikipedia's IIgs page that the "32 channels" were paired to create 16 stereo channels, with 15 normally available, and the 16th reserved for OS sounds, and with the mono output, the channels would simply be stuck as 15/16 mono voices, rather than stereo. (so no panning) Just like the way sounds on the SNES or Genesis work with the individual channels being able to be paired for true stereo. (though only for th eFM channels on genesis, and both could also use hard l/r/center panning with the single channels as well -which is what was usually done for stereo effects rather than sacrificing channels to have true stereo panning)

 

The quality of the wavetable instruments is indeed rather excellent I agree Reminds me a lot of the AWE32 and Gravis Ultrasound PC cards from the 90s. It is the same chip as two professional Ensoniq synthesizers use.

 

I's more reminiscent of the SNES to me, actually. (actually closer technically as well, with both having only RAM for sample storage, no built-in sample ROM) The SNES has higher resolution samples though (16-bit ADPCM format), not sure about the sample rates though, and the SNES had some pretty heavy filtering.

 

I never had an ultrasound as far as I can remember, I know we had a few soundblaster wavetable cards, and several SB-16 compatibles, plus general midi compliance (including onboard sound on more recent PCs). However, from the stuff I've heard on it, I don't like the Ultrasound at all, Doom sounds bad, especially At Doom's gate, I'd take Adlib/SB any day over that, or microsoft General midi. (though perhaps Doom is a poor example, I haven't heard a whole lot of other Ultrasound stuff) From the little I've heard, some of Roland's GM soundcards are good, but I still haven't heard ones that really surpass the MT-32 at its best. (plent that sound better than some poorer uses of MT-32, or MT-32 mapped to play general midi sequences; in some cases SoundBlaster was done better, like X-Wing CD-ROM for DOS, which has excellent SB/Adlib music, SB-16 especially, rather so-so general midi -depending on card, and OK MT-32 -better than GB, but worse than SB-16)

 

The 68008 is just an 8bit external bus version of the 68000, it's pretty much crippled really, the Sinclair QL uses one. It's a strange combination...32bit internal and 8bit external.

The 68008 is also limited to a 20-bit address bus, right? And it's not just 32/8-bit either since there's both 16 and 32-bit portions internally. (like the 16-bit ALU)

Edited December 19, 2009 by kool kitty89

[oky2000]

(Genesis)

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

(Arcade)

Interesting stuff. The Amiga controll is a mouse which is much more like the arcade. The genesis and others used a gamepad which really makes the game fail.

 

Well, unless thay added support for the Sega mouse... (which of course didn't come until later) Intersting to note that the homebrew Wolf3D for the 32x is going to have mouse support.

 

It has 32 oscillators which are paired up to make 8 stereo channels but as the IIgs is hardwired to output only mono and you need either soldering skills or an adaptor card to get stereo sound output = 8 channels mono no? officially it is classed as an 8 note polyphonic stereo chip. I think 8/16 stereo/mono is where the confusion results in the 16 channels and 16 stereo channels perhaps. Still 64kb of user sample memory for all channels anyway. Need to research this more.

Oh, so there are 32 individual oscilators, with 2 per voice, making 16 voices which are then paired into stereo but mixed to mono, making 8 voices. (or 8 stereo voices with an add-on) Did I get that right?

I'd gotten the impression from the summary of the DOC chip on wikipedia's IIgs page that the "32 channels" were paired to create 16 stereo channels, with 15 normally available, and the 16th reserved for OS sounds, and with the mono output, the channels would simply be stuck as 15/16 mono voices, rather than stereo. (so no panning) Just like the way sounds on the SNES or Genesis work with the individual channels being able to be paired for true stereo. (though only for th eFM channels on genesis, and both could also use hard l/r/center panning with the single channels as well -which is what was usually done for stereo effects rather than sacrificing channels to have true stereo panning)

 

The quality of the wavetable instruments is indeed rather excellent I agree Reminds me a lot of the AWE32 and Gravis Ultrasound PC cards from the 90s. It is the same chip as two professional Ensoniq synthesizers use.

 

I's more reminiscent of the SNES to me, actually. (actually closer technically as well, with both having only RAM for sample storage, no built-in sample ROM) The SNES has higher resolution samples though (16-bit ADPCM format), not sure about the sample rates though, and the SNES had some pretty heavy filtering.

 

I never had an ultrasound as far as I can remember, I know we had a few soundblaster wavetable cards, and several SB-16 compatibles, plus general midi compliance (including onboard sound on more recent PCs). However, from the stuff I've heard on it, I don't like the Ultrasound at all, Doom sounds bad, especially At Doom's gate, I'd take Adlib/SB any day over that, or microsoft General midi. (though perhaps Doom is a poor example, I haven't heard a whole lot of other Ultrasound stuff) From the little I've heard, some of Roland's GM soundcards are good, but I still haven't heard ones that really surpass the MT-32 at its best. (plent that sound better than some poorer uses of MT-32, or MT-32 mapped to play general midi sequences; in some cases SoundBlaster was done better, like X-Wing CD-ROM for DOS, which has excellent SB/Adlib music, SB-16 especially, rather so-so general midi -depending on card, and OK MT-32 -better than GB, but worse than SB-16)

 

The 68008 is just an 8bit external bus version of the 68000, it's pretty much crippled really, the Sinclair QL uses one. It's a strange combination...32bit internal and 8bit external.

The 68008 is also limited to a 20-bit address bus, right? And it's not just 32/8-bit either since there's both 16 and 32-bit portions internally. (like the 16-bit ALU)

 

Yes the 68008 is a real mess....perfect for Sinclair machines like the QL haha.

 

The PC soundcard thing is complicated though, things like the MT-32 sound great but can't do bespoke sample effects where as the Gravis can do everything in one card. The Gravis won many awards in PC magazine reviews and without it Creative wouldn't have produced the AWE32 card probably. I had a 1mb Gravis.....in a 4mb PC Generally though at that time PCs were a mess, and you needed to set 1 card for sound effects and one card for music in the config and not all cards could do both before the Gravis The IIgs therefore is superior because it can do all things in many channels...sample ram of just 64kb being it's only Achilles heal.

[kool kitty89]

Yes the 68008 is a real mess....perfect for Sinclair machines like the QL haha.

yeah, but still probably better than a 8088, though more expensive with roughly double the silicon and a larger package. On the Sinclair comment though, maybe they should have just gone with a fast (8 MHz rated) Z80 instead and goen for a more straightforeward successor to the Spectrum with backwards compatibility and expanded addressing capabilities. (might have avoided some of the delays the QL experienced as well and probably been cheaper at that)

 

The PC soundcard thing is complicated though, things like the MT-32 sound great but can't do bespoke sample effects where as the Gravis can do everything in one card. The Gravis won many awards in PC magazine reviews and without it Creative wouldn't have produced the AWE32 card probably. I had a 1mb Gravis.....in a 4mb PC Generally though at that time PCs were a mess, and you needed to set 1 card for sound effects and one card for music in the config and not all cards could do both before the Gravis The IIgs therefore is superior because it can do all things in many channels...sample ram of just 64kb being it's only Achilles heal.

 

From what I've heard I don't care for the AWE32 all that much either, though like the Ultrasound I haven't heard all that much done on it. (neither are really better than the standard MS general midi)

 

The thing about the digitized sound effects is somewhat true, but the popular standard, SoundBlaster always supported both digitized sound and musical synthesis capabilities (with backwards compatibility for previous models), granted some other companies with compatible cards (particularly Yamaha'a) had superior sound quality to Creative's generally poor analog circuitry. (SB-16 was the best of the original line, but still kind of funky -noisy and muffled -DOSbox and other softrware emulation provide extrememly crisp clarity, but nt entirely acciurate emulation)

However, sometimes you'd get a high-end unit like the MT-32 or one of the 3rd party GM/wavetable cards and also include a SB card for just sound effects. (well that, and a few games which only supported adlib/sb standards)

 

In some cases, like Wing commander, there were no digitized sound effects, it catered to vanilla Adlib based sounds and music as well as MT-32, and that's pretty much it.

 

In general a fiar number of games made rather mediocre use of the Adlib/SB's synthesis capabilities, a few late games, partiulrly those taking advantage of the SB-16s improvements, did sound great plus had good digital sounds due to the SB-16's 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo. (some still didn't support that, and thus you were stuck with SB-1/2 quality mono 8-bit low sample rate playback and adlib quality music) Soem games even made pretty good use of the vanilla OPL2 of Adlib and pre-SB16 (pro had dual OPL2s).

There were also a fair number of games supporting Soundblaster standards and not others like Ultrasound, X-Wing for example. (MT-32 persisted into the early-mid 90s and General Midi was becoming popular) SB standards even continued into the mid/late 90s, even into many windows specific games (pretty much all DOS games continued support).

 

There were probably lots of people with only SB compatible cards for a good amount of time, and even if they had better cards with SB compatibility as well, you might end up using that compatibility more often than not. (again, I even prefer SB type music -at least from a good card or DOSbox- X-Wing is a prime example, 4-op FM is th eonly way to go for me, Doom is probably better with General midi although the Adlib/SB support is passable -and I'd take Doom Adlib music than the replaced ambient crap on the PSX/Saturn releases)

Edited December 20, 2009 by kool kitty89

[oky2000]

Yes the 68008 is a real mess....perfect for Sinclair machines like the QL haha.

yeah, but still probably better than a 8088, though more expensive with roughly double the silicon and a larger package. On the Sinclair comment though, maybe they should have just gone with a fast (8 MHz rated) Z80 instead and goen for a more straightforeward successor to the Spectrum with backwards compatibility and expanded addressing capabilities. (might have avoided some of the delays the QL experienced as well and probably been cheaper at that)

 

The PC soundcard thing is complicated though, things like the MT-32 sound great but can't do bespoke sample effects where as the Gravis can do everything in one card. The Gravis won many awards in PC magazine reviews and without it Creative wouldn't have produced the AWE32 card probably. I had a 1mb Gravis.....in a 4mb PC Generally though at that time PCs were a mess, and you needed to set 1 card for sound effects and one card for music in the config and not all cards could do both before the Gravis The IIgs therefore is superior because it can do all things in many channels...sample ram of just 64kb being it's only Achilles heal.

 

From what I've heard I don't care for the AWE32 all that much either, though like the Ultrasound I haven't heard all that much done on it. (neither are really better than the standard MS general midi)

 

The thing about the digitized sound effects is somewhat true, but the popular standard, SoundBlaster always supported both digitized sound and musical synthesis capabilities (with backwards compatibility for previous models), granted some other companies with compatible cards (particularly Yamaha'a) had superior sound quality to Creative's generally poor analog circuitry. (SB-16 was the best of the original line, but still kind of funky -noisy and muffled -DOSbox and other softrware emulation provide extrememly crisp clarity, but nt entirely acciurate emulation)

However, sometimes you'd get a high-end unit like the MT-32 or one of the 3rd party GM/wavetable cards and also include a SB card for just sound effects. (well that, and a few games which only supported adlib/sb standards)

 

In some cases, like Wing commander, there were no digitized sound effects, it catered to vanilla Adlib based sounds and music as well as MT-32, and that's pretty much it.

 

In general a fiar number of games made rather mediocre use of the Adlib/SB's synthesis capabilities, a few late games, partiulrly those taking advantage of the SB-16s improvements, did sound great plus had good digital sounds due to the SB-16's 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo. (some still didn't support that, and thus you were stuck with SB-1/2 quality mono 8-bit low sample rate playback and adlib quality music) Soem games even made pretty good use of the vanilla OPL2 of Adlib and pre-SB16 (pro had dual OPL2s).

There were also a fair number of games supporting Soundblaster standards and not others like Ultrasound, X-Wing for example. (MT-32 persisted into the early-mid 90s and General Midi was becoming popular) SB standards even continued into the mid/late 90s, even into many windows specific games (pretty much all DOS games continued support).

 

There were probably lots of people with only SB compatible cards for a good amount of time, and even if they had better cards with SB compatibility as well, you might end up using that compatibility more often than not. (again, I even prefer SB type music -at least from a good card or DOSbox- X-Wing is a prime example, 4-op FM is th eonly way to go for me, Doom is probably better with General midi although the Adlib/SB support is passable -and I'd take Doom Adlib music than the replaced ambient crap on the PSX/Saturn releases)

 

Both SB and SB16 were of inferior quality to the Gravis and AWE32 even without their funky reverb and echo effects in hardware to beef up the sound being used.

 

General Midi tunes are a terrible example of comparing those two cards with other music only cards especially ones designed only to play general midi and nothing else, grab a PC based MOD player and play some X3M or MOD tunes on a Gravis and AWE and you will instantly appreciate the difference in versatility....you can't play Super Stardust 96 Mods on a Rolan LAPC1 or MT32 so for people who used to own an Amiga there was no contest really

 

Once Windows 95 was out, SB compatibility also became nothing more than blurb on the boxes of Soundcards....Microsoft screwed Creative's monopoly overnight...wonder who will do it to Microsoft....wait that would be the internet, the codec pack groups and the Java/Flash based website who don't care if you are logging in with AmigaONE + OS4.1 Google will kill Microsoft oneday...they're a bit busy at the moment laughing all the way to the bank with their various strategic purchases and search engine monopoly though so give them a bit of time....Window's days are numbered....and it's been too long in coming if you ask me. PS3 for gaming and machine independent activities (mp3,divx,flash & JAVA, Bittorrent clients) mean you never need give MS a penny of your cash ever again hooray!!

[kool kitty89]

Both SB and SB16 were of inferior quality to the Gravis and AWE32 even without their funky reverb and echo effects in hardware to beef up the sound being used.

 

General Midi tunes are a terrible example of comparing those two cards with other music only cards especially ones designed only to play general midi and nothing else, grab a PC based MOD player and play some X3M or MOD tunes on a Gravis and AWE and you will instantly appreciate the difference in versatility....you can't play Super Stardust 96 Mods on a Rolan LAPC1 or MT32 so for people who used to own an Amiga there was no contest really

I wasn't comparing to General midi stuff, but music in games which specifically supported those cards (like Doom), the general midi comment was in th econtext of comparing the same games when set to general midi. (using the generic microsoft general midi instruments)

It's a matter of taste, I personally am very fond of FM synthesis music, at least when done right, and again, creative's cards aren't the best examples to use aas they cheaped out on the analog circuitry. (some compatibles sound much better, liek Yamaha's, though nothing as clear as emulation in dosbox/VDMsound -other than a few inaccuracies)

Also, wasn't digital sound output (PCM playback) rather similar for SB-16 and Ultrasound?

Couldn't the SB16's digital channel be used for a MOD player? (or was the onboard "DAC" not powerful enough for that -necessitating CPU resourse)

 

Once Windows 95 was out, SB compatibility also became nothing more than blurb on the boxes of Soundcards....Microsoft screwed Creative's monopoly overnight...wonder who will do it to Microsoft....wait that would be the internet, the codec pack groups and the Java/Flash based website who don't care if you are logging in with AmigaONE + OS4.1 Google will kill Microsoft oneday...they're a bit busy at the moment laughing all the way to the bank with their various strategic purchases and search engine monopoly though so give them a bit of time....Window's days are numbered....and it's been too long in coming if you ask me. PS3 for gaming and machine independent activities (mp3,divx,flash & JAVA, Bittorrent clients) mean you never need give MS a penny of your cash ever again hooray!!

Perhaps, but sound card advertizements were one thing, games are another. (DOS games prominently supported SB to the end and many early win9x specific games supported it as well, at very least until 1997) Most PC games I was playing as a kid in the mid 90s were using sound blaster. (x-wing, Jazz Jackrabbit, numerous edutainment titles)

And I'm not sure, but we may have had Return to Zork and Myst set-up through SoundBlaster. (albit many of th emidi tunes on Zork sound very similar in FM synthesis and Myst is pretty much all streaming/looped digital audio playback)

[+poobah]

(using the generic microsoft general midi instruments)

 

Also, wasn't digital sound output (PCM playback) rather similar for SB-16 and Ultrasound?

Couldn't the SB16's digital channel be used for a MOD player? (or was the onboard "DAC" not powerful enough for that -necessitating CPU resourse)

 

the "generic microsoft general midi instruments" are actually the Roland Sound Canvas instruments. The Sound Canvas was the Cadillac of general midi board for the PC.

 

There are(were?) many mod players for the PC that did exactly that, using the SB16's 2 digital channels.

[marvio]

I've been messing around with a bunch of IIgs games in emulation over the past week and I must say that this system is really under appreciated. I was inspired enough to purchase a IIgs on eBay this week. The variety of software available is rather impressive. Here is a site that has a nice sampling of titles http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/.

 

I am looking forward to spending some time with the old beast when she arrives during the holiday.

 

Fletch

 

I never found a reliable Windows IIgs emulator last year and found some of the disk images on that website for IIgs stuff corrupt. Anyone know of a reliable IIgs Windows emulator...I spent about a week on this and then gave up to be honest. Wouldn't mind seeing Gauntlet IIgs specific version running.

I have never found one, the active gs, which is an active x emulator (they have a downloadable version too), is the "best", but it falls way short of emulating everything...

 

The IIGS is a wonderfull machine, I have two of them one ROM0 and a ROM1, if you ever need ANY software just let me know, I have pretty much everything ever released for it!! Including, now, the "Sword of Sodom"!! I got it right from the developer, gonna load it up on my ROM1 and make a video, we'll see how accurate that first video was...

[marvio]

Yes the 68008 is a real mess....perfect for Sinclair machines like the QL haha.

yeah, but still probably better than a 8088, though more expensive with roughly double the silicon and a larger package. On the Sinclair comment though, maybe they should have just gone with a fast (8 MHz rated) Z80 instead and goen for a more straightforeward successor to the Spectrum with backwards compatibility and expanded addressing capabilities. (might have avoided some of the delays the QL experienced as well and probably been cheaper at that)

 

The PC soundcard thing is complicated though, things like the MT-32 sound great but can't do bespoke sample effects where as the Gravis can do everything in one card. The Gravis won many awards in PC magazine reviews and without it Creative wouldn't have produced the AWE32 card probably. I had a 1mb Gravis.....in a 4mb PC Generally though at that time PCs were a mess, and you needed to set 1 card for sound effects and one card for music in the config and not all cards could do both before the Gravis The IIgs therefore is superior because it can do all things in many channels...sample ram of just 64kb being it's only Achilles heal.

 

From what I've heard I don't care for the AWE32 all that much either, though like the Ultrasound I haven't heard all that much done on it. (neither are really better than the standard MS general midi)

 

The thing about the digitized sound effects is somewhat true, but the popular standard, SoundBlaster always supported both digitized sound and musical synthesis capabilities (with backwards compatibility for previous models), granted some other companies with compatible cards (particularly Yamaha'a) had superior sound quality to Creative's generally poor analog circuitry. (SB-16 was the best of the original line, but still kind of funky -noisy and muffled -DOSbox and other softrware emulation provide extrememly crisp clarity, but nt entirely acciurate emulation)

However, sometimes you'd get a high-end unit like the MT-32 or one of the 3rd party GM/wavetable cards and also include a SB card for just sound effects. (well that, and a few games which only supported adlib/sb standards)

 

In some cases, like Wing commander, there were no digitized sound effects, it catered to vanilla Adlib based sounds and music as well as MT-32, and that's pretty much it.

 

In general a fiar number of games made rather mediocre use of the Adlib/SB's synthesis capabilities, a few late games, partiulrly those taking advantage of the SB-16s improvements, did sound great plus had good digital sounds due to the SB-16's 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo. (some still didn't support that, and thus you were stuck with SB-1/2 quality mono 8-bit low sample rate playback and adlib quality music) Soem games even made pretty good use of the vanilla OPL2 of Adlib and pre-SB16 (pro had dual OPL2s).

There were also a fair number of games supporting Soundblaster standards and not others like Ultrasound, X-Wing for example. (MT-32 persisted into the early-mid 90s and General Midi was becoming popular) SB standards even continued into the mid/late 90s, even into many windows specific games (pretty much all DOS games continued support).

 

There were probably lots of people with only SB compatible cards for a good amount of time, and even if they had better cards with SB compatibility as well, you might end up using that compatibility more often than not. (again, I even prefer SB type music -at least from a good card or DOSbox- X-Wing is a prime example, 4-op FM is th eonly way to go for me, Doom is probably better with General midi although the Adlib/SB support is passable -and I'd take Doom Adlib music than the replaced ambient crap on the PSX/Saturn releases)

 

Both SB and SB16 were of inferior quality to the Gravis and AWE32 even without their funky reverb and echo effects in hardware to beef up the sound being used.

 

General Midi tunes are a terrible example of comparing those two cards with other music only cards especially ones designed only to play general midi and nothing else, grab a PC based MOD player and play some X3M or MOD tunes on a Gravis and AWE and you will instantly appreciate the difference in versatility....you can't play Super Stardust 96 Mods on a Rolan LAPC1 or MT32 so for people who used to own an Amiga there was no contest really

 

Once Windows 95 was out, SB compatibility also became nothing more than blurb on the boxes of Soundcards....Microsoft screwed Creative's monopoly overnight...wonder who will do it to Microsoft....wait that would be the internet, the codec pack groups and the Java/Flash based website who don't care if you are logging in with AmigaONE + OS4.1 Google will kill Microsoft oneday...they're a bit busy at the moment laughing all the way to the bank with their various strategic purchases and search engine monopoly though so give them a bit of time....Window's days are numbered....and it's been too long in coming if you ask me. PS3 for gaming and machine independent activities (mp3,divx,flash & JAVA, Bittorrent clients) mean you never need give MS a penny of your cash ever again hooray!!

 

Believe you me, MS is not going anywhere, they have their hands all over platform idependent OS/Software

[kool kitty89]

the "generic microsoft general midi instruments" are actually the Roland Sound Canvas instruments. The Sound Canvas was the Cadillac of general midi board for the PC.

Hmm, interesting, so Roland's sound canvas general midi instruments became the standard for common onboard sound for motherboards and laptops (and the Xbox -not sure about the 360, Doom on that uses the awful -IMO- Ultrasound rendition -while the Xbox sounds like the "general midi" on my laptop and old desktop's onboard sound)

To be sure I'm referring to this:

 

I tend to prefer those general midi instruments for most stuff (well other than MT32 "emulation" -though sometimes's that preferable to adlib, like for Silpheed), but for X-Wing and Tie Fighter, SB-16 (4-op FM) is the only way to go. (especially with DOSbox's high clarity -I think one of our soundblaster compatibles sounded about that good as well)

And I'd take Adlib/SB on Doom over Ultrasound (but not general midi), and I don't think id even bothered with supporting any added features past the SB-pro, and maybe not even that for the music. (I think the sounds are stereo, but they seem pretty coarse to be taking advantage of the SB-16, and music sounds the same whether set to adlib or SB -which is often the case -X-Wing -at least the CD version, adds some stuff sepcific to the 4-op FM capabilites of the SB16)

 

There are(were?) many mod players for the PC that did exactly that, using the SB16's 2 digital channels.

Did any actually use the SB-16 hardware alone for stuf like that, or did most/all use the CPU for MOD?

Edited December 23, 2009 by kool kitty89

[marvio]

"(and the Xbox -not sure about the 360, Doom on that uses the awful -IMO- Ultrasound rendition -while the Xbox sounds like the "general midi" on my laptop and old desktop's onboard sound)"

 

_________________

 

Does the Xbox, even the original, or the PS2/3 even have MIDI anymore? If they still do , does any app still use it? At this point in the game MIDI can't compete at all, unless you're talking about some heavy duty soft synth, ala Sonik2, or the likes (but by then you'd need all the power the XBOX/PSX consoles can muster just to run it, and about 10X the HD space for samples), why in the world anybody use MIDI at this day in age?

 

It's straight WAV or MP3's now... Sheesh even 7 years ago when I was in the biz very few people still used MIDI, MP3's were all the rage, and a strange version of MOD, which the Unreal engine used...

Edited December 23, 2009 by marvio

[+remowilliams]

I never found a reliable Windows IIgs emulator last year [...]

Same here. Sadly it seems that the available IIGS emulators fall far short.

[marvio]

I never found a reliable Windows IIgs emulator last year [...]

Same here. Sadly it seems that the available IIGS emulators fall far short.

Yep

 

Like I said Active GS is the better of them.

 

This site: http://www.virtualapple.org/2gslistA.html has it, but like I said there is a downloadable version of this

[JamesD]

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.

YOU never had the benefit of a hard disk. They were available and the GS OS file system supported large drives.

 

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

That's why accelerators were popular with a lot of GS fans. I think the fastest were still under 24MHz and that was from modified accelerator boards.

 

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.

Apple had been working on a faster version of the GUI but never released it when management decided to can the IIgs.

 

 

Running a IIgs from a hard disk with and accelerator is a major improvement but it still doesn't measure up to what you find in the 68K world.

I think the GUI update would have made a huge difference in performance but that's the way it goes.

[JamesD]

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.

NONE were 1MHz. You could set it in 1MHz mode for running old software that depended on it.

[Fletch]

I've been using Sweet 16 on the Mac OS X and it is rather good. Not sure if they make that for Windows or not.

[+remowilliams]

I've been using Sweet 16 on the Mac OS X and it is rather good. Not sure if they make that for Windows or not.

Isn't that the update to Bernie ][? And no, neither is available for Windows.

[kool kitty89]

NONE were 1MHz. You could set it in 1MHz mode for running old software that depended on it.

 

That makes a lot more sense. Still, I don't see why a 4-6 MHz (if not 8 Mhz) 65816 wouldn't have been possible in '86. (and still be a lot cheaper than a 8 Mhz 68000)

Unless Apple was intentionally hadicapping the IIgs to make the Mac look better. (didn't they do that with some late 680x0 machines to emphesize the new PPC ones?)

 

It seema like split priorities (perhaps internal problems in Apple, Jobs vs Woz was mentioned earlier), if the IIgs is going to end up handicapped, it seems like a much better idea to add the IIgs's color and sound capabilities to an upgraded macintosh. They should have either gone one or the other, IIgs route or Mac, in the latter case, I persoanlly think the IIgs might have been better, of course Apple would go on to switch CPU architectures twice more, with PPC and x86. (of course, the relatively limited enhancements of the 650x architecture in the 65C02 and 816 lines didn't help push for continued manstream use of the architecture either, then again there's the Z800 which wasn't really used at all -while the C02/816 continue to be used as embedded processors, microcontrollers and such)