As the IIgs has become my primary system for experiencing Apple II software, I’ve installed a few upgrades for “quality of life” improvements
The first of these is a Booti card. This emulates a Apple II HDD. It’s a rather nifty device that allows me to run hard disk “images” directly from a USB drive. It simply plugs into the “highest numbered” slot and even provides a useful menu to manage what images you are managing.
Some nice features are the ability to skip the boot sequence by pressing “N” (for next boot device) which allows me to use it with my FloppyEmu. (I’m starting to understand why some people have two FloppyEmus too.)
You can also have up to 8 devices that you can simply choose at boot time, by pressing the associated number.
This has dramatically simplified playing with images on this system! I still have two things ordered to complement this. Firstly is a USB flylead to take the USB port from INSIDE the Apple to outside. This’ll allow me to more easily update the contents of the USB stick. Secondly is a tiny little USB stick I purchased off e-bay so that it won’t stick out too much.
Next up is a Ram Upgrade from Garrett’s Workshop. This gives me up to 8MB† of RAM on the system. Turns out the base 128k of the IIgs really isn’t enough to play almost anything written specifically for the IIgs. It still meant I could play the immense back catalog of Apple II / IIe games but I wanted to sample the improved sound and graphics of this beast of an apple.
With the addition of this I have indeed been able to play the improved games.
I have a Z80 card coming, but I think I’ll stick that in the Apple IIe for completeness sake. Then I’ll be able to run CP/M on yet another system.
(For those counting at home, I can run CP/M on the Commodore 128D and the BBC Master right now. With the next card I’ll be able to run it on the Apple II and down the track, once I get a DDI 5 for the Amstrad CPC, I should be able to ad another two more systems to my “army” of CP/M systems. If only there was something I needed to run on CP/M other than Zork.)
Still debating what March’s upgrade will be. Will I get a DDI 5 for the Amstrad or a SD2SCSI for the Mac SE/30? I’m leaning towards the SE/30 upgrade, but leave comments below if you think I should do something else.
†(edited to correct by a factor of 1024 the amount of RAM I had fitted to the Apple IIgs)
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