IIgs ROM 3 compatibility

[abbub]

I keep seeing references to the ROM 3 boards being faster, but slightly less compatible. My googling has failed to turn up any definitive answer to what these compatibility issues might be, though, or how the word 'slightly' is defined. Does anyone have an idea on this, or a link to a FAQ that my google skills have failed to provide me with?

Thanks!

 

[Dog Cow]

I can count the number of ROM03 incompatible programs which I've experienced on one hand. They are mostly the FTA-type demos.

The speed increase is due to more of the GS/OS toolbox being in ROM rather than having to be loaded from disk.

 

[abbub]

Okay, that's good to hear.

My wife came downstairs while I was playing Tetris on my Mac SE and got very excited, because it 'looked' like the version of Tetris she played as a kid on an Apple II. But after playing one game, she announced that it was not quite the same, because the sound wasn't right, the screen was too small, and it wasn't in color.

I was at TedHodges massive mac sale down in denver last weekend, and bought a IIgs on a whim, thinking I'd hook it up and surprise her. I got it set up, made an RGB cable for my 1084S (the composite output on it really sucks), and, through some trail and error and some help from OS X/Classic on my G4 and my (also new) SE/30, managed to get Tetris transferred over to a 3.5 inch floppy. The .2mg diskette image worked great in an emulator, and boots up and loads Tetris just fine on the IIgs, but as soon as you select the level and speed and hit start, the program crashes.

I was afraid that the ONE game I actually wanted to use it for (well, initially, anyway! might be incompatible. I also copied over the Police Quest diskettes and managed to get about 35 points before I quit, so it seems like my convoluted method of getting a.2mg onto the system works. I'm not sure what's up with Tetris. bah.

 

[david__schmidt]

Where'd you get your tetris image from? We can try it too. And you could try it in an emulator as well.

 

[abbub]

The test image came from here: http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/tetris. I tried it again last night, using the much less convoluted method of simply creating the disk directly from the .2mg image with ADTPro, and it still didn't work. I did load it up under Bernie ][ under System 9, and it worked without issue.

Thanks!

 

[overdriver]

ROM3 incompatibility is with some games like Skyfox which uses Mockingboard(hardware). It crashes IIGS. Ultima 5 has patch for it though.

 

[abbub]

Hrm. This is the error message:

02/154D 00 C9 BRK C9

A=A086 X=0001 Y=0000 S=17F7 D=0800 P=81 B=02 K=02 M=0C Q=BE L=1 m=0 x=0 e=0

My buddy who has a ROM 1 board took a disk that was failing here and it worked on his system. The game is unhappy about something. The system passes the 'test mode' that you can boot into.

 

[Paralel]

Can you just swap for an earlier ROM version or are there significant hardware differences as well?

Doesn't know much about Apple II systems ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

 

[abbub]

basically the ROM version is the logic board version, so moving to a ROM 1 system would entail finding a ROM 1 logic board.....and at that point, it's probably easier just to replace the entire GS with a completely different ROM 1 system.

 

[madmax_2069]

the only place i have seen that lists any software that wont run on a IIgs rom 3 the following link http://home.swbell.net/rubywand/Csa2GAMES.html#005

as to what caused the issue could be the size of the rom itself, because don't it load into ram ?

 

[abbub]

That's an interesting list. Especially the presence of Shuffle Puck, which, according to the whatistheapple2gs site, was never officially released for the IIgs.

 

[madmax_2069]

A friend of mine told me this

Some are due to ROM address locations because of the ROM03 being

double the size, and some are due to the ram size difference.

but he also said that most games that are in image format have been fixed already (except the ones in that list).

 

[ppuskari]

made an RGB cable for my 1084S (the composite output on it really sucks)

That is great! I did that in college about 1991 timeframe. I always thought using the IIGS on the Commodore Amiga 1084S was just the BEST. The image just seemed bigger and crisper than the Apple RGB monitor and having stereo sound right there from the speakers was wonderful! Had a VCR and a Apple Overlay Card too and that was our dorm room TV for about a year. (That was also one of my first solder hacks building that connector too)

SOMETIMES - I've found that depending on how much ram you have in your IIGS some games would ONLY work if you set it to 1MEG or 2MEG of available ram. To do that just setup the rest of the ram as a ramdisk. I can't remember specifically which games that helped but it seemed to be the issue whether on the Rom 01 or Rom 03's I've did that with.

Something to try at least.

 

[olePigeon]

Asmov archive has several different version of Tetris, though I don't know what they mean. Maybe one of these will work:

Tetris

Tetris 48k

Tetris 128k

And just incase, cuz memories can be fuzzy:

Tetris 2

Tetris 2 (2)