Re: DOES IT MAKE ANY SENSE

The Wizard of Oz wrote: 
On Mon, 19 Dec 2005 02:38:19 +0100, Jorge Chamorro Bieling wrote:


Let's say that you could buy a "gadget" card that:

-is a many-tens-of-MHz accelerator for the a2.
-has a lots-of-64k-ram-banks-expansion-card.
-allows you to connect a "vga" video monitor.
-allows you to run&see 4 a2's concurrently on the screen.



	Cool idea.


Is the a2 anyway such an obsolete thing in every other aspect (not only
the hardware) that this does not make any sense ?



	Tough question. The thing is if you can do all those things and even (in
single processor mode) bump the speed up to even half the clock speed of a
modern Mac or PC, you'd still be looking largely at the "geek" crowd.
There would still be a number of issues to deal with.


I think the OP meant "tens of MHz" of *emulated* speed, which is
on par with the fastest software emulators.  Since hardware emulation
has at least an order of magnitude advantage over software emulation
speed, that seems quite plausible.

	The business folks wouldn't give it a look without killer apps. Even if
there were fantastic applications for business the PHBs and bean counters
wouldn't let one in the office.


I never even considered the possibility of anything but hobby uses.
Let's be reasonable...

	For home use the software out there needs to be improved. The games are
OK for us older folks and younger kids. Those in between want to play
games like Quake. With a couple more tweaks it shouldn't be too hard. A
lot needs to be done with a graphic e-mail program and web browser. Us old
timers would be satisfied with text but you aren't going to get anybody
younger than 30 without whiz bang graphics applications.


Whoa!  "Shouldn't be too hard" doesn't fit with at least 1024x768
32-bit color graphics with full 3D and texture mapping!  Modern games
run on the equivalent of supercomputers compared to even a 100MHz
Apple II!  I can see it all now--4096 banks of 64KB, and that only
gets you to 256MB!

	A lot of us would like to see a file system (ProDOS compatible) with a
much larger capacity. To save headaches, perhaps something like ext3
(Linux) would be a good example. The 1K clusters are nice.

	Additional hardware I'd like to see would be an Ethernet connection and a
USB connection. You can talk with the people developing these cards and
see how far they've come.

	For the old peripherals you could do something like a "black box" for
slots. If you replace the old peripherals with something more modern and
compatible then I'd have no issues with mixing the old and new.

You would buy it ? 


	No. Not because I'm cheap. Because I don't have the cash.


Why would you buy this if you can emulate it ? 


	I'd much rather have a portable hardware solution. Something I can bring
in to an office and annoy PHBs with.


It is *extremely* unlikely that any home-brew/low-volume hardware device
could ever remotely approach the compactness, cost, and usability of a
modern emulator running on a modern laptop.  (Portable pretty much rules
out the peripheral bus, so why not emulate?)

Why yes ? 


	Good idea. The whole Apple// concept was designed for low price and ended
up as a high stability machine. If you could bring the cost (minus
peripherals) in at just less than a modern PC and if the software were
there, you could blow some minds. As soon as I can plug my Apple// into my
LAN without any fiddling (just like my Linux box) we have something
serious to show off.


Not any more.  Aspirations have moved on.  As many PCs are used for
photo and video editing these days as for word processing.

I reiterate that a new Apple II is something that only an Apple II
nut could love (God bless 'em  ;-).

Why not ? 


	Too many things going at the same time. Not enough money. I've moved on
to (mainly) Linux. I still have my GSs in a place where I can use them. I
haven't turned them on in quite a while, but they are there if I need them.


What do you think ? 


	As something to do... Why not... All you have to lose is money.

	As a commercial product. Maybe if the developers here could give you a
hand with the hardware and software. You aren't going to make money from
the people here. You may break even and have enough money for some fries
by the end of the day. You want to knock off the PC market. To do so you
need not just the vast volume of software which exists already. You'll
need to give people in the home and office market a reason to switch. If
the typical office drone could walk into the office with a machine which
would let them finish their task on time (so they could go and get a
six-pack after work for the big game), it would be a BIG start.


The truth is that there are no developers interested in a non-mainstream
platform for the masses.  And if you find one, you know he's out of
touch with reality.  Kind of a Catch-22.  ;-)

The ones who love success are already in the PC market.  The ones who
hate Microsoft are already in the Mac or Linux market.  Only the ones
who love Apple II's are even thinking about coding for Apple II's, and
you could fit them all into a medium-sized McDonalds.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."
.

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