The Apple IIGS Family

[Lim Thye Chean]

We now have 2 Apple IIGS in our family, yes! After so many years, we finally have real machines in our house, not running emulation.

All my kids love Apple IIGS, they will say "Apple IIGS" when they see the rainbow Apple logo, not "Mac". This is especially true for my son, who has learned how to program on an Apple IIGS via emulation. He now finally has his own machine, courtesy of a kind gentleman called Willie Yeo. Without his machine, I will never brought back my Apple IIGS from Penang, and realized that it is still alive, after a decade of sitting on a table doing nothing. I thought that it is dead, but in fact it is the monitor.



So after all these years, we now have 2 Apple IIGS. One for the family (which is my old pal), still proudly playing music and play games in the living room, after 20 years. One for my son, who can now finally has his own Apple IIGS for programming.



Thank you, Willie, and thank you, all of the Apple II friends that still keep the dream and the machines alive. Apple IIGS Forever!

[James]

That's wonderful! I should get a a IIGS setup at my house since I have never really used one and therefore a brand new experience. It would be also nice having so many IIGS experts available to help me!

[Lim Thye Chean]

There are possibly 2 different perspective you can see from Apple IIGS: One is its root from Apple II world, where the history now starts from 1976 not 1984, and how the series comes to an end at Apple III and was killed, and reborn as Apple IIx (later called Apple IIGS). The other perspective is how it is both similar and different from Mac - like Mac, it has Finder (and in fact the first color Finder from Apple) and all the familiar environment. And unlike Mac, it has command prompt which is much more closer to the Mac OS X two decades later. It is this familiar yet different world that make Apple IIGS such a unique machine.

[Wholly Mindless]

I know you talked a little bit about using the TV before, but how is that working out? Is it "too good" for the //gs output? Apple //'s are known for "tricking" the video signal to get color and so on.

[Lim Thye Chean]

Hi, it is pretty good for 320x200 resolution Super Hires mode (except there are some colors along white lines). It is pretty bad for 640x200 resolution Super Hires. Most games used the 320 mode so they looked quite good.

The 8 bit Apple II Hires and Double Hires looks very good, just like the original.

You can see a series of images taken from the TV screen in my photo album "Apple IIGS Applications".

[Wholly Mindless]

I wasn't sure how you'd captured them so I wasn't sure if we were seeing screen or emulation artifacts. Thanks for the update!

[Lim Thye Chean]

They are all taken using camera (or to be more exact, mostly from iPhone).