epobirs
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Posts posted by epobirs
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Yes, the Brits know about the C64 GS and carts, but not of 80s carts for C64, eg Activision, Atari, Parker. ZZAP!64 was all in vain.
Taken in context the paragraph is correct. Keep in mind, the C64 GS (and the Atari XEGS) were not treated as cut down versions of old 8-bit systems. They were marketed as new platforms with a lot of emphasis on new game titles rather than existing ROM games using miniscule 8 and 16 KB cartridges. These machines supported bankswitching schemes that allowed the content to get into the range previously associated with games sold on floppy disk. Some old favorites were repackaged but generally the idea was that given much larger capacity to work with the developers could squeeze more life out of these platforms if the complexity of dealing with tapes and disks were eliminated.
This might have been a viable business if mask ROM cost and capacity had improved at a much faster pace, allowing cortridge only systems to be pushed while these platforms were still driving the market. But the Amiga was already several years in the market when this was launched.
The big problem was another part of the console market they didn't understand: Nintendo's publishing model for third party products. This was the entire basis for the resurrection of consoles as a viable business. The reason Sega struggled for so long before enjoying a few good years with the MegaDrive/Genesis was their own failure to adopt the publishing model for almost a decade after it first appeared with the Famicom/NES.
It is because of this model, by which software production is closely controlled by the console maker and a royalty fee imposed on third parties for access to the platform, that manufacturers can sell a console for minimal or even negative margin and still make substantial profit in the long term through software sales. If Commodore had understood this they could have launched a games focused version of the Amiga much earlier than their eventual CD-32 and perhaps been a serious player in the console realm.
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It was kind of absurd to release a new 8-bit console at that late date. The hardware was so terribly dated and while mask ROM prices allowed for much higher capacity and porting of disk-based games, the amount of bank-switching hassles involved was non-trivial in the extreme. But then, it was hardly any better on the Atari XEGS.
I don't think either company really understood where the console market was going at the time. The PC Engine (TurboGrafx16 in the US) was already making a big splash in Japan, briefly becoming the dominant platform. The Sega MegaDrive (Genesis in the US) was just launched, and Nintendo had already run some technology demos for what would soon be known as the Super Famicom. The only place the existing 8-bit computers might have been worthwhile is in a handheld format but that would have been prohibitively expensive.
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http://archive.kontek.net/jlounge.classicgaming.gamespy.com/junkman.html
Looks like it was a clone by a garage coder. Like a lot of TI and CoCo stuff. But if you can find the files and a good emulator, give it a try. There are a great number of hidden gems out there in clones of popular games. I find the differences in implementation fascinating, and the added twists or features the cloners often introduce can be a lot of fun.
This is true of some commercial games as well. The Jak & Daxter series were great but only available on Sony platforms. Mainly the PS2, with an HD remake collection now coming to the PS3. If you wanted more of that gameplay or didn't have a PS2, the great alternative was the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series from EA. These were on the Nintendo GameCube, the Xbox, and the PS2 and were priced at bargain levels. They can still be played on all but the most recent Wii models and on the Xbox 360 under emulation.
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I have a Fujitsu scanner. If there is someone who can help me with the right settings and the post processing I could probably start on the ones that I have
Darryl
For magazine scans to searchable PDF files, the default settings in ScanSnap Organizer are probably a perfectly good starting point.
My main use for the SnapScan is feeding through paperbacks that had the spine removed to make e-book versions. I've done a bunch for Jerry Pournelle. Three volumes of Imperial Stars anthologies, High Justice, and Exiles to Glory are the ones that will appear on Amazon and B&N next. I've just started on the Endless Frontier anthology series with four volumes and then there will be the There Will Be War anthologies with nine volumes.
For that job the bundled software with the S1300 had some annoying deficiencies that greatly added to the workload. I got ahold of the coprorate desktop edition of ABBYY Finereader and that was a huge improvement for e-book work. Generally, though, I'd rather have a plain text file and format that than try to retain any formatting from a book scan because so much crud sneaks in and makes for more work.
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I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap these days, which is really useful for e-book conversions. I could do magazine scans if anyone has sacrificial copies available to reduced to loose pages that can pass through the scanner.
Like I noted earlier, I have six boxes of BYTE that I am willing to donate, but they are located here in Australia. If you are able to arrange their transport you can have them.
Darryl
I'm afraid my budget is far too constrained for that. It would probably be cheaper to send you a scanner via a retailer serving your region! Which might work out if enough people wanted the project to continue and there was somebody at your end to do the manual labor.
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Is anyone else scanning Byte issues? Unfortunately, Thumpnugget's amazing effort didn't cover the era I really need for a project. I'm trying to gather up all of Jerry Pournelle's old Chaos Manor columns for a retrospective e-book. (I've been helping Jerry get all of his out of print material up on Amazon and B&N. I just finished the Imperial stars series of anthologies and started work on High Justice today.)
I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap these days, which is really useful for e-book conversions. I could do magazine scans if anyone has sacrificial copies available to reduced to loose pages that can pass through the scanner.
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Drive alignment can be a big issue. We ran into it a lot at Cinemaware. Some of the copy protection schemes were really abusive of the drives. Of course, this wouldn't have been possible of the firmware were better designed and didn't allow a drive to seek a track outside the range of the format. Slam!
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Sorry if this strays too much from the original topic, but to everyone that likes Ruiner so much... what do you think of Alien's Crush, Devil's Crush (both TG-16 games) and Dragon's Fury (Genny)? Crue Ball, Sonic Spinball (both Genny) and Timeball (TG-16) are NOT in the same league IMO.
Alien and Devil... those are my absolute favorite "fantasy" video pinball games. By fantasy, I mean non-traditional graphics - but the game's are generally extremely faithful when it comes to the playability and physics of a real pinball - for a video pintable that is. Polished wise, they trump Ruiner in spades - again, IMO.
If you've never played some of these, they're worth checking out
I agree, the Crush series is the standard for this kind of fantasy pinball genre. There was a third game on the Super Famicom in Japan that was never released here. Every copy I ever saw was priced far too high for me to justify buying.
Another good one in the same vein is Pinball of the Dead on the GBA. It's themed on the Sega 'House of the Dead' series.
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The Atari ST has J. R. "Bob" Dobbs in the ascii code
A friend of mine liked to hack games to change the graphics. On the ST version of Rogue (Epyx) he changed the Bat to be an attacking Bob Dobbs head.
On the Atari 800 he made a very clever disk sector editor with the special feature of displaying the sector as player-missile data. It made it very easy to find objects in games and alter them.
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I probably still have one in a box in my storage locker. I really need to get rid of most of that stuff.
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Very timely thread, I am in the market for an Amiga, never owned one. Not too many for sale it seems in Canada here except a few overpriced ones, the ones I saw on Ebay in the States the shippers wont ship internationally, so I have been browsing European sites. Some nice ones from Germany but I dont sprechen sie. The UK has a steady stream to offer, I am thinking a 1200 with the 4G CF option then I read this thread which for the most part seems to validate my original thoughts.
Thanks all
You'll need to consider that the European ones use a different power supply and default to PAL video mode. Neither of those are show stoppers, but you'll want to get an external A1200 or A500 powers supply from the US or Canada.
Plus, if you get a PAL monitor for use in the US, make sure you set up in a room with no windows or good blackout blinds. The disparity between the scan rate and the lights in the room can give you a headache. It's really bad for some people. We use to playtest in darkness with a little desklamp we turned on when we needed to make a note, when we were testing for UK/Euro releases.
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Depends what you plan to do with it, if you are buying it as a games machine you are better off getting a console. I think that alot of Amiga games have aged really badly and most of the best ones have better versions on the consoles. Plus those old disks are very unreliable these days . . .
I'd strongly disagree there. There is a immense number of Amiga games that are unique to the system or the only other version was on the Atari ST, which would frequently be inferior if the game really took advantage of the platform. (Sometimes, oddly, the ST version would be better due to the talents of the programmer or it being the originating version and the person doing the Amiga port having a poor understanding on how to adapt things. A good example of this syndrome was the Xbox port of Metal Gear Solid 2, which should have offered improvements but was mediocre in execution.) Yes, many of these games are knock-offs of arcade titles but very often those brought new twists to the concept that added some fun.
Further, there a ton of games that had no version on later consoles, leaving the Amiga as the best version.
But I wouldn't bother with the hardware other than for the pleasure of getting acquainted with what it felt like in action. I still have a 500 w/monitor and accessories packed away in storage but if I had a yen to play any of that stuff again I'd go to the emulator on one of my PCs. The issue of the original media is hardly pertinent at this late date. Buy a pile of ancient floppies at a garage does the creators of those products no good, and that is what copyright is for. At this late date, if you were to meet one of the game programmers from that era, the best you could do is buy them lunch or something. That is at least a tangible benefit.
It's been a looong time but you'd be surprised how many games can be made to work from hard drive, although emulation makes that moot. When I was at Cinemaware we'd get letters from people telling us how they'd manage it with games that had shipped before there were any hard drives for developers, never mind end users! Unless this is something you've dedicated yourself to doing, just run it from a virtual floppy in the emulator. Life is too short to go back to systems where transferring a 100 KB a second was considered high performance.
And yes, I'd let the 500 and all of my Amiga stuff go fairly cheap if someone would just come and get it. I just don't have the space and I really need to empty out that storage locker to cut expenses. I've no idea how functional any of it is but if you can come out to Castaic (North Los Angeles County just off the 5) and have a hundred buck for some vintage gear...
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Hooray! The scans live again! I'd given up but checked in today on a whim.
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Computers are appliances - you just turn them on. They're tools to get something else done.
Exactly! But they're fun tools to use to get information about old computers (ones we care about) and game consoles!
I think JackB doesn't appreciate how we got where we are today. Perhaps he doesn't realize that radio didn't start in the 20s and TV didn't start in the 50s. That is just when they gained widespread acceptance as devices for distributed packaged media. If you look at hobbyist magazines of the WWI era, you'll recognize a lot of the same interest and excitement found in vintage Byte issues of decades later. It was the hobbyists who drove the developments that made the ubiquitous products possible. In each case there were early observers who couldn't imagine these becoming items in the possession of nearly every citizen rather than costly and rare tools of government agencies and large business concerns.
Imagination matters.
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I don't believe the idea of plug'n'play was really practical until recently with USB 2.0, actually several years after that came on the market.
Now, there are several Apple II cards that could be plugged into the system and nothing else needed to be done. No drivers, no jumpers, no lengthy configurations. hahahah!
The worst were those combo-cards and multi-function cards with memory expansion on them; for the PC that is. I have an old ISA card with like a bank of 20 jumpers that needs to be set. What a mess..
Aren't you contradicting yourself here? You mention how painful the ISA days were but seem to forget how much better things had gotten well before USB 2.0 was launched. Just USB itself saved a vast amount of IRQ allocation problems. And much of that was already alleviated by PCI's greatly improved handling of IRQs. In fact, PCI made such a difference that the big push to get rid of resource hogging legacy ports collapsed. There are still newly deployed machines in the corporate sector with PS/2 ports. The machines come with USB mice and keyobards but the bank considers it too risky to be unable to use older gear in a pinch.
Around the time of Windows 95, it was getting pretty worrisome trying to get everything you wanted into a PC. Just a few years later, before even USB 1.1 had displaced any legacy ports, this had largely stopped being problem. So many of the old troubleshooting procedures fell by the wayside as the problems ceased to appear on newer systems.
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In case anyone was curious, PCI was "inspired" by (cough - stolen from - cough) AutoConfig. You can't look at the two from a hardware standpoint without coming to that conclusion.
That is nonsense you'd have to live in a very small world to believe. There were numerous examples of autoconfiguring expansion systems before and after the Amiga. The Amiga was far from the most prominent pioneer in EE circles. The only thing that was especially notable about the Amiga slots was their appearnce in a relatively low-priced system accessible to consumers. They owed a certain heritage to things that came before , like S-100.
Any time a project has a chance to do something from scratch without backward compatiblity concerns, there is always the question, how would you implement X if you were using today's tech. The Amiga Bus slots were a perfect example of that. Transistor budgets were a bit higher, RAM a bit available, etc.
Think about the size of Atari VCS cartidge ROMs and think about how the same cost of ROM affected things like how much could go on an expansion card. Then move ahead a few years and consider how the changes affect design decisins. This was stuff that had been worked out on paper many years earlier but had to wait until they were economically feasible.
The far more interesting aspect of PCI is the serial operations that were previously done as parallel as a matter of course. As performance level climbed this was starting to cause problems but using serial communications would have seemed like a huge performance sacrifice in the process. Things just got so fast that it no longer mattered.
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Atari 8-bits were used for this sort of thing quite a lot. The built-in large text modes made possible to whip up a feed in BASIC very quickly. There was at least one company that used Ataris with a custom controller for a teleprompter. This was when mechanical teleprompters were still in use and protected by a very strong union that saw the new technology that anyone could learn in minutes as a big threat.
The Fry's Electronics stores used Atari as well for an in-store message display. There would be TVs set up in various locations, announcing various specials and promotions.
A LOT of cable station used Amigas. One in Arcadia, CA would often crash, leaving a Guru Meditation error displayed.
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It looks more to be a reference to the 'Hustler' movie with a Paul Newman sorta look alike.
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Or the CoCo for that matter . . . a 1.79 MHz 6809 with Atari-style wait states (effective 1.2 MHz) would have been much nicer than the interleaved video DMA, albeit it should have needed a faster rated CPU (except the CoCo already supported the address dependent mode to allow 1.79 MHz working in ROM). For that matter, the Apple II, CoCo, or any other system using interleaved DMA primarily with video could have disabled interleaving in vblank and doubled the CPU speed. (ST and Amiga had primary DMA interleaved as well -floppy disk, sound, blitter, hard disk, etc, so a bit of a different case)
In that respect, the apple II and CoCo both could have managed a roughly 26% performance boost (62% in 50 Hz PAL video), assuming the CPUs could run at 2x speed in RAM without wait sates. (the A8's DRAM refresh overhead cut performance by about 12%)
The GIME from the CoCo III lets the CPU run at 1.79MHz for all memory addresses.
Motorola supposedly developed a new SAM that did the same for older CoCos but they never released it.
The existing SAM could do it for all addresses but it disabled RAM and video refresh where the GIME does not.
The circuit diagram of the SAM doesn't look too complex so a drop in replacement should be doable in a small PLD.
The real shame is that Motorola had a high powered AV chip set for use with the 6809 and intended for arcade machines and home computers. Nobody ever used it in the consumer market. It had some very impressive features for that era. It was likely a cost issue, as I never saw any quotes on pricing for mass quatities. Only a dev board that was about a thousand bucks and mainly sent around to companies doing arcade games.
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Up until the mid-80s Apple enjoy far better financial returns and stability than anyone battling in the 8-bit consumer market. It didn't matter that in many ways their technology was severely dated. The Apple II line didn't even have upper and lower case letters until the IIe. What really matter was that they were taken seriously by people who had serious money to spend and Jobs has always been happier catering to the affluent. It didn't hurt that they managed to work scams in several state, including CA under Jerry Brown (I can't believe this guy is governor again) to give computers to schools in exchange for tacx credits of value far greater than the cost of the donation to Apple, as the valuation was based on the retail price of the donation. Apple would then pretend to be discounting that while still being well ahead on the actual cost.
By the mid-80s, Jobs actively wanted the Apple II to go away. He actively sought to kill the GS before launch and managed to forced crippling engineering choices. The worst being the fixed 16KB video RAM. This made it painful to do the simple page flipping that was the staple of animation and scrolling on the Apple II. The audio processor was very advanced for the era but implemented on the board in such a way as to be cripplingly constrained. This was fixed somewhat in a later revision that gave it a good-sized chunk of its own RAM, relative to the era. Everybody working with the prototype Courtland boards knew this was a serious problem.
On the software side, it isn't clear what, if anything, was done to sabotage that but by the time there was a decent OS for the IIgs it was hardly worth bothering anymore.
In a saner world, the IIgs would never have been created. It made far more sense to give the Apple II owners an upgrade path to the Macintosh that would preserve their existing software investment and open them up to what the Mac had to offer, rather than creating an almost entirely new platform that Apple didn't really want to succeed. In fact, Apple did do this with an optional board for the Mac II LC (IIRC) but only after much, much suffering by the Apple II faithful.
Imagine the schism if Atari and Commodore had been flogging 65816 extensions of their 8-bit systems at the same time they were trying to sell the ST and Amiga. I once asked Leonard Tramiel about it and he said it was strongly considered but ultimately there were too many hassles in trying to move forward staying backward compatible. Better to cut the cord and move on. A big issue for Atari at the time was the need to create a new but compatible chipset. This would have taken far too long and required far more resoruces than they had could muster. (Consider how long the Amiga chip set was in development before the first model became a shipping product.)
If they had enough cash they have made a bid to pick up the Mindset and made it more of a consumer oriented system. The big bonus here, in addition to having an Amiga-like chip set, was using an x86 CPU. They could have been offering hardware acceleration for Windows before ATI. But that is another reality branch point we'll never know.
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MIDI was an immense selling point to the professional and hobbyist markets but there was a hope within Atari that it would also save them from the expense of creating a decent sound chip for the original ST. The hope was that something like a Casio CZ-101 (we sold those at the Atari store I worked at when the ST launched) would soon be cheap enough that people would commonly add one to their system just for the audio from games and such, even if they weren't inclined to make their own music. If it had been viable to do a keyboardless version for under $100 in 1986 that idea might have flown.
Later, when I was working at Cinemaware, the severe difference in audio capabilities was a sticking point when it came to porting the Amiga-originated games to the ST, along with the difference in graphic hardware capability. This was a real problem not unlike the situation today where many PC gamers feel the quality of new games is being severely constrained by the need to give primary consideration to the PS3 and Xbox 360. The Amiga was the place to knock people's socks off but the place to make money was still in the Commodore 64 and the PC was in ascendence at the time the company died. To an extent, the Amiga was held back by being too far ahead of everything else. But even that was ultimately doomed in the face of the combination of Windows and the open PC architecture. In it's waning days, Commodore like to talk about Retargetable Graphics (RTG), but so much of the Amiga's character and identity was tied up in that original chipset that it couldn't really walk away from that. It just lack the appeal of the complete package wrought by a relatively small crew of creators.
The PC has given us the benefit of free market competition, with companies like Nvidia and ATI/AMD competing intently to advance the same platform. But no matter how cutting edge your box today, it's very hard to ivest the same passion the platforms of yore drew from their users.
One fo the best takes on this era of games ported across platforms of wildly varying abilities was in Terry Pratchett's first of the Johnny Maxwell books, Only You Can Save Mankind. It opens with a magazine advert for the game central to the plot, perfectly in tune with UK game mags of the day. In the small print at the bottom it reads: Screenshots are of version you didn't buy.
Do you think in a way that this constraint to make the game for consoles could be slowly killing of PC gaming or do you think it is still going strong.
There is a question of definition to consider. By virtue of being an open anyone can play platform, how could PC gaming actually be killed off? The real question is whether it will remain a worthwhile venue for big budget productions to produce ports that make full use of the PC's cutting edge assets.
The answer for a lot of companies is no. But that has been their answer for decades.
Back when Cinemaware was circling the drain, the Ad Lib audio board had a small amount of support and its clone, the Sound Blaster was just entering the market. A year or so earlier Cinemaware had a guy doing a design for a PC audio that would be cheap enough to use in our games without universal market adoption. Sound Blaster eventually became a standard basis for how audio was done, at least until Windows provided enough hardware abstraction to make it a non-issue. But it took years before every game developer saw the Sound Blaster as something they had to do in their PC games. Just like it took years for sucessive generations of video cards to gain support. CGA was the one universally support video mode, followed by EGA, then growing support for Tandy 1000 mode (which was really PCjr. revived), followed by VGA. Again, until Windows provided sufficient hardware abstraction, it was all modifications of VGA.
We were really excited about VGA back when it first appeared. Finally the PC could be a kick-butt game platform without the stigma attached to brands like Atari and Commodore. But it took a long time before anyone would ship a game that solely ran in VGA due both to the time it took to grow the installed base and have that coupled with a PU of sufficient power to get things moving. (Keep in mind VGA didn't include any hardware acceleration for line draws and blitting. That didn't really happen until ATI became a force in video chips and even that was driven by the need to speed up Windows rather than gaming.)
So consoles and console-like computers had a big advantage for game developers since the earliest days of the industry. If you had 500K Atari 800s in the market, you knew what every single one of those machines would reliably do. The only concern might be how much RAM was installed. By comparison, a like number of PC can be wildly divergent in what capabilities are included. This was especailly a hassle in the DOS days when every hardware asset had to be addressed directly the memory map could change depending on the combination of installed hardware. This continues today. A PC produced since the launch of the Xbox 360 could have any of a dozen generations of GPU technology, plus numerous generations of CPU. This is why whatever graphics solution puts in their chip set, or now in the CPU itself, is so important as it sets the minimum developers can depend upon being able to use.
10 million Playstation 3s are ten million identical machines you can use to the best of your ability. Ten million PCs are... a whole bunch of platforms that just happen to have a lot of compatibility.
On the other hand, consider Minecraft. You can be one guy plugging away after work and on weekends on your PC game project. You can walk into any store and buy the hardware and download numerous development tools, many of them free. No permission from a corporate gatekeeper required. For distribution all you need to do is upload to a wid range of hosting choices, once more , many of them free. Then go on some forums and tell people, "Hey, check out my game." Within 24 hours you'll be getting bug reports from places you never knew existed. You may even have some paying customers without having invested a fortune in advance on producing discs and manuals, etc.
PC gaming can never truly die. It may not command the attention of companies spending tens of $millions and employing dozens of people on a single game, and those games that do get ported may make the fullest use of the latest hardware. But it will always be the place where new talent can try out an idea cheap, show themselves to the world, and start something great.
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MIDI was an immense selling point to the professional and hobbyist markets but there was a hope within Atari that it would also save them from the expense of creating a decent sound chip for the original ST. The hope was that something like a Casio CZ-101 (we sold those at the Atari store I worked at when the ST launched) would soon be cheap enough that people would commonly add one to their system just for the audio from games and such, even if they weren't inclined to make their own music. If it had been viable to do a keyboardless version for under $100 in 1986 that idea might have flown.
Later, when I was working at Cinemaware, the severe difference in audio capabilities was a sticking point when it came to porting the Amiga-originated games to the ST, along with the difference in graphic hardware capability. This was a real problem not unlike the situation today where many PC gamers feel the quality of new games is being severely constrained by the need to give primary consideration to the PS3 and Xbox 360. The Amiga was the place to knock people's socks off but the place to make money was still in the Commodore 64 and the PC was in ascendence at the time the company died. To an extent, the Amiga was held back by being too far ahead of everything else. But even that was ultimately doomed in the face of the combination of Windows and the open PC architecture. In it's waning days, Commodore like to talk about Retargetable Graphics (RTG), but so much of the Amiga's character and identity was tied up in that original chipset that it couldn't really walk away from that. It just lack the appeal of the complete package wrought by a relatively small crew of creators.
The PC has given us the benefit of free market competition, with companies like Nvidia and ATI/AMD competing intently to advance the same platform. But no matter how cutting edge your box today, it's very hard to ivest the same passion the platforms of yore drew from their users.
One fo the best takes on this era of games ported across platforms of wildly varying abilities was in Terry Pratchett's first of the Johnny Maxwell books, Only You Can Save Mankind. It opens with a magazine advert for the game central to the plot, perfectly in tune with UK game mags of the day. In the small print at the bottom it reads: Screenshots are of version you didn't buy.
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I too would vote in favor of Thumpnugget continuing his excellent work. The quality really matters for me because I'm trying to recover all of the old Chaos Manor columns with the goal of creating a new retrospective e-book. The idea is to gather up all of the column with new material from Jerry offering perspective from 15-30 years later. Recovering the text goes much better when the source image is better.
Though if anybody with a set of issues from 1982 to around the mid-90s could scan just those pages, I'll take any help I can get. The last few years were digitized and I've obtained those through archive services at university libraries but anything earlier tends to be bound in massive year set doorstop volumes that could be wielded to slaughter cattle. They're hard to just plain read the area near the binding and scanning is very difficult at best. Really good digital archives require some slicing and dicing of sacrificial issues.
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OK! That is is for the next few weeks.. Feels good to have 1976 completed.. I was going to save the Vol 2-2 until I returned but there was a specific request for it so there was not much point in letting it sit around
Looks like there is some heavy bandwidth happening right now.. The upload looks good.. Just slow right now.. be patient.
Okay, it's been two weeks, are you back yet?
I believe if you look back he indicated he would be gone for pretty much the whole month. Be patient. The free candy will return someday.
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The reason why Apple Computers never had hardware sound synthesis
in Apple II Computers
Posted
Sorry but the GS was horrible. It was the most painful platform to support of that era. Users expected results comparable to the Amiga and Atari ST but that was simply impossible due to the crippling and astoundingly stupid design of the video memory. It was a static page, locked in place. The simple page flipping that was the mainstay of Apple ][ games could not be used, along with numerous other techniques reliant of freedom to move video memory location. This made simple scrolling a major undertaking.
The Courtland upgrade for the //e that was supposed to make it into a GS? Garbage. So wildly incompatible that nobody supported it.
The sound chip was impressive but in the first generation of the GS it too had a crippling RAM implementation, making its usability very limited. Developers had to decide if they were going to tell first gen GS buyers they were out of luck or essentially write their games with two different audio forks, one of far lesser quality than the other.
At Cinemaware we felt pretty sure this was all intentional sabotage. That Apple wanted to be done with the ][ as a platform once and for all. It would have been more reasonable if they had a board for a low-end Mac to run ][ software, especially in schools making the transition. This is exactly what they eventually did in the Mac LC but only after inflicting the GS on the ][ user base. This was just one of numerous incidents that drove me away from Apple. To this day I've never bought into any of their platforms. I'll use it if somebody else is providing the gear and wants something done but it won't be my money.