Games - Apple IIGS

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The Apple IIGS, the fifth model inception of the Apple II, was the most powerful member of the Apple II series of personal computers made by Apple Computer. At the time of its release it had stunning color graphics and state-of-the-art sound capabilities that surpassed those of most other computers, including the black and white Macintosh (apart from a lower vertical resolution). Following in this theme the "GS" in its name officially stood for "Graphics" and "Sound", a reference to its vast enhancement in this area over previous models of the line. Along with its true 16-bit architecture, increased processing speed, direct access to megabytes of RAM and a Graphical User Interface and mouse now standard, the machine was a radical departure from any previous Apple II. While still maintaining full backwards compatibility with earlier Apple II models, along side its new features, it represented a hybrid machine of sorts that blended the Apple II and aspects of Macintosh technology into one. The Apple IIGS set forth a promising future and evolutionary advancement of the Apple II line, but Apple paid it relatively little attention as the company increasingly focused on the Macintosh platform.

Background

The IIGS was released in September 1986. It was intended to compete with personal computers such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST at the time of its release and was somewhat popular with schools, but Apple failed to promote and update the IIGS, preferring to focus on the Macintosh instead. The IIGS lacked compelling features over its competitors and increasingly fell behind other personal computers over its lifetime, and Apple ceased production of it in December 1992.

Hardware features

The Apple IIGS was an innovative computer with many improvements over the older Apple IIe and Apple IIc. It emulated its predecessors by utilising a custom chip called the Mega II and used the new Western Design Center 65816 16-bit microprocessor running at 2.8 MHz, which was faster than the 8-bit 6502 and 65C02 processors used in earlier Apple IIs and also allowed the IIGS to use more RAM. It also included enhanced graphics and sound, which led to its name. The graphics of the IIGS were the best of the Apple II series, with new Super High Resolution (SHR) video modes. These included a 640×200-pixel mode with 2-bit palletized color and a 320×200-pixel mode with 4-bit palletized color, both of which could dip in to a 4,096 color palette. By changing the palette on each scanline, it was possible to display up to 256 colors or more per screen, which was quite commonly seen within game and graphic design software. Audio was generated by a built-in sound and music synthesizer in the form of the Ensoniq Digital Oscillator Chip (DOC), which had its own dedicated RAM and 32 separate channels of sound, which were paired to produce 15 voices, in stereo audio.

The IIGS could support both 5¼-inch and 3½-inch floppy disks and, like the IIe before it, had several expansion slots. These included seven general-purpose expansion slots compatible with those on the Apple II, II+, and IIe, plus a memory expansion slot that could be used to add up to 8 MB of RAM. The IIGS, like the IIc, also had dedicated ports for external devices. These included a port to attach floppy disk drives, two serial ports for devices such as printers and modems (which could also be used to connect to a LocalTalk network), an Apple Desktop Bus port to connect the keyboard and mouse, and composite and RGB video ports.

Hardware revisions

Although Apple never introduced a substantially enhanced version of the IIGS after its initial release, it did create several slightly revised hardware versions.

The initial version, often known as the "ROM 0," was the one introduced in September 1986.
In September 1987, a slightly revised version known as the "ROM 01" was introduced. This included updated ROM routines, and ROM 0 machines could be updated to ROM 01 by replacing the computer's ROM chip with an updated one. (Some ROM 0 machines also included faulty Video Graphics Controller chips which were replaced when performing the ROM 01 upgrade.) Authorized Apple dealers could perform the upgrade from ROM 0 to ROM 01. ROM 01 is the minimum version needed to run later versions of the Apple IIGS System Software based on GS/OS
rather than ProDOS
16.
The final released hardware revision was known as the "ROM 3," which came out in August 1989. The ROM 3 IIGS included a revised motherboard, so it was not possible to upgrade earlier machines to it by replacing chips. It included more updates to the software included in the ROM, as well as an improved motherboard design featuring 1 MB of built-in RAM rather than 256 KB (although all revisions could be upgraded to a total of 8 MB). The motherboard design was also designed to increase audio quality and allow more power to be delivered to the Apple II peripheral cards
in the expansion slots.
Some work was done on a "ROM 4" design featuring more features integrated onto the motherboard and into the case, but it was never released (although a few individuals outside of Apple did obtain prototypes). This model, called variously the Apple IIGS+, the ROM 4, or "Mark Twain" (after his famous misquote regarding the exaggeration of his death), had an internal floppy and SCSI hard drive, and included two 30-pin SIMM sockets for memory expansion. It ran at the same 2.8 MHz as preceding IIGS hardware versions.

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Games - Apple IIGS

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Hardware features

Hardware revisions

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