Nebulon

"Just like the old arcade grips!" Well, not exactly. Still cool though.

oh dear.

I'm thinking Kirk and Spock should have ordered up an Apple II to make communicating with V'ger easier (and a whole lot more fun!)

So I have a rather nice Apple IIe that works great in all situations (as long as I have disks for it). However -- as of late -- it has been refusing to drop down to the ] prompt if I reset it after powering it on (without anything in the drives). Usually, I can power it up and then press CTRL OpenApple Reset and it shows the command line. Lately it instead displays a message stating that it can't load ProDOS. It's not a big deal because I have DOS disks and can boot it that way. But it would have been a big deal back when I first got this machine with absolutely no software. Just wondering if other people have run into this problem and what the cause of it might be. Could it be the Apple ROMs?

Here's the 1994 PC Magazine audio interface benchmark: https://books.google.ca/books?id=RjY3gFmnC8UC&pg=PA214&lpg=PA214&dq=wavelite+software+gravis+ultrasound&source=bl&ots=VoIf9W-54h&sig=X-VCsNG05xTQl_8LJdx6bWZSgqs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiHwIu31vnSAhVBUmMKHfn8Be4Q6AEINDAE#v=onepage&q=wavelite%20software%20gravis%20ultrasound&f=false

I'm really hoping for cases to become available too.

Thanks! I see that an interface for this really doesn't exist at this point. This will take some playing around to get right (for me at least). Oh well, all part of the adventure...

I wish my odds have been as good as yours, because I had to mail-order mine (and salvage the rest from dead Amiga 2000s). Waah!

I've seen at least six rev. 6A Amiga 500s with 8370s installed from the factory. That's six out of the eight Amiga 500s I've taken apart. The other two had rev. 5 boards with 8370s as well. So that's zero of eight Amiga 500s that I've personally seen with 8372A blitters in them. As for Amiga 2000s, I'd say a bit over half of the ones I've seen have 8372A chips.

The RAP-10's list price was $600.00 and its performance level is a notch below the Turtle Beach card that I mentioned.

Of course, seeing something like this on the Atari in 1993 would have had quite the impact: I'm pretty sure this falls under the category of creative use of the Falcon's DSP.

You're fortunate enough to have an 8372A blitter in your Amiga 2000. There are a lot of rev. 6A boards out there (usually A500s) with 8370 blitters that don't have the option to switch to PAL.

I think the Joust cab ad controls could be saved. It looked like it fared quite well (especially compared to the other ones). It really should be hauled out of there and given some care.

Holy smokes! I never would have guessed that's what it was for. Thanks for finding that info. Maybe NASA put one on a ship and attach it to a rover First Apple IIe in space (unless that's already been done...).

So I opened up an Apple IIe that someone gave me recently. It has a card leading to a ribbon cable that plugs into a box with a label on it that reads, "Interactive Structures Data Acquisition System AI-13" Anyone know what this peripheral is?

Yep! You are correct. It's GVP.

You do not have to make any additional modifications to an Amiga 500 or 2000 with rev. 6A motherboards when swapping out the blitters. If you'd like me to send you video evidence proving this and showing the difference in timing on the same North American machine with an 8372A fitted, I'd be happy to.

Maybe some here? https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/disk_utils/

Anyone thinking of writing programs on the Apple II? There's some neat stuff here: https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/programming/assembler/ And if you need hardware drivers... https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/hardware/

Maybe I should have said learn instead of teach. Even when the Amiga was still current, good stuff was coming from UK and Europe. I do agree though, things continued to be optimized even into the more modern era on what (by then) were considered antiquated machines. If you saw the grade-school level of programming over here, you'd laugh and laugh. It looks like -- globally -- it was mostly up to the individual to learn this stuff. I do think the demo scene helped motivate people there though.

Some examples for people out there that want to see and hear the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJeBndoUkdM&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZKWHNHBgMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PaWafHWVcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLZoYUgilkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaKY87e6j04

If you take a Rev 6A Amiga 500 or 2000 and pop out the blitter and replace it with either a 512K 8371 or a 1MB 8372A then you can go ahead and play European games on your North American Amiga. As for why the games are generally better from across the pond, it's because they have a better programming education there. They teach assembly language at a much earlier age than here. Plus there's the demo scene which creates intense competition to squeeze every last drop out of the machines (and to do that, you need to code to the metal). I'd rank the Scandinavians as the best programmers on the planet. The Black Lotus The Silents and many others. UK is really strong in that department too: Team 17 Psygnosis DMA Design (which became Rockstar games) The Bitmap Brothers

I understand where you're coming from. In my own case, I was cutting my teeth using Amigas for audio and waiting for the day the PC would be ready to go "prime time" in that arena (I could see that the Amiga was on the way out by around 1995). I was working at a PC store at the time -- keeping a close eye on audio technology developments. The Falcon was a nice example of a system that was well-suited to certain tasks. In this case, audio recording was used as an example. The Amiga would usually be cited as video. People got quite a bit of mileage out of those platforms for their specific needs. Up until the early to mid-90s, you could get away with systems that treated the CPU as an adjunct rather than the core of the hardware design as long as you provided a good surrounding infrastructure.

Many years ago, I corrupted an Amiga 2000 SCSI chain because I didn't terminate it properly. The other thing I ran into was that some devices had trouble with certain drive controllers. I ended up ordering a Guru ROM upgrade for the SCSI controller I was using (I think it was so that I could use a 1GB Jaz drive).

Again, it depends on what you're doing with the machine. The audio recording quality of the Gravis Ultrasound wasn't up to the task of pro audio work. You'd be hard-pressed to find a PC in 1993 that could do this (especially at the price point): http://atarimusic.exxoshost.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=133:cubase-audio-falcon-206-and-studio-module-107a&catid=78:falcon-music-software&Itemid=343