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[MAME] Apple IIgs Emulation / SCSI Driver & Questions

egrath

Well-known member
Hi, i just started playing around with the IIgs (in Emulation) and have a few questions about this system, which eventually someone is able to answer:

1. As far as i understand, ProDOS is the base operating system with GS/OS as the graphical shell on top of it, similar to the combination of MS-DOS/Windows 3.1?
2. Anyone has experience with MAME's apple2gs emulation? I had the following issues:

- Created a empty, 32 MB ProDOS image with AppleCommander and converted this image to CHD.
- Run the apple2gs emulation on MAME with the following commandline: mame apple2gs -window -prescale 8 -sl7 scsi -skip_gameinfo -speed 2 -hard hd32.chd -flop3 install.2m which bootet the installer successfully, but no disk was found
- Installed System 6.01 in another emulator (GSplus) without issues
- Booted the Image in MAME, but got the error shown below
- Seems that for the Apple II SCSI Card a driver is needed when using a low-level emulator like MAME/MESS. Anyone has this driver disk, was unable to find it with my Google Research (only found the Utility disks)


1655889943525.png
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Not sure about Question 2, but yes you could describe ProDOS + GS/OS as comparable to DOS/Windows 3.1. GS/OS itself is very much like System 6.0x on the Mac, and would have been pretty amazing in the day for an Apple II user.
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
GS/OS includes the drivers to all the supported Apple SCSI cards. They aren't required though as GS/OS will work (slower) without them, using the Smartport ROM driver on the card.
 

egrath

Well-known member
OK, this makes sense. In that case, as the "Apple II SCSI Card" was officially supported on the GS this has to be a bug in the MAME driver for the card.
 

Skate323k137

Well-known member
I've gotten that screen on a real IIgs when it didn't like the attached SCSI drive or when a SCSI emulator is misconfigured. Swapping in a working drive fixed it without any change to the installed GSOS drivers.
 

Arbee

Well-known member
Yes, I know I'm necrothreading :)

That screen means your installed system doesn't have the SCSI drivers. You can either install them or use MAME's CFFA2 emulation instead, which doesn't care about drivers (but then also doesn't support Apple Partition Maps). With the System Software floppies you have to boot from a specific one to get SCSI drivers, there's two of them that can boot but only one has the drivers.

Regarding ProDOS vs GS/OS, it's more nuanced. The IIgs up until mid-1988 ran on ProDOS 16, which was very much analagous to the DOS + Windows 9X combination. ProDOS 8 was running underneath and it wasn't optimal. GS/OS shipped that year and it's a completely native 16-bit OS that uses the same base filesystem and has some back compatibility, like going from Windows 98 to XP. Unlike NT though, it was immediately faster than the ProDOS 8 + ProDOS 16 stack and got even faster in 5.0 and 6.0.
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
The "first" version of GS/OS was numbered 2.0. Apple continued the versioning from ProDOS 16, the last version of which was 1.6.

No relation to System Software revisions though. The first to include GS/OS and required ROM 01 was System Software 4.0 released in 1988. The last revision of ProDOS 16 (and last to run on a ROM 00 machine) shipped on System Software 3.2.
 

volvo242gt

Well-known member
The "first" version of GS/OS was numbered 2.0. Apple continued the versioning from ProDOS 16, the last version of which was 1.6.

No relation to System Software revisions though. The first to include GS/OS and required ROM 01 was System Software 4.0 released in 1988. The last revision of ProDOS 16 (and last to run on a ROM 00 machine) shipped on System Software 3.2.
It also required 512KB to work. Something that people who bought the Stealth GS upgrade kit for the //e didn't get, whereas normal IIgs machines came with the memory expansion card preinstalled when GS/OS was officially released to the public. So, people like me had to use ProDOS 16 on our ROM 01 IIgs upgrade kit machines until we upgraded to more than 256KB.

System Software 3.0 (the original IIgs ProDOS 16 disk) came with the ProDOS 8 Apple II Desktop version of the finder. Wasn't until 3.1 that Apple used the GS/OS style Finder.
 

Arbee

Well-known member
Was there a public System Software 3.0? The first one my dealer got with the Finder was 3.1 in the spring of '87, and then 3.2 came out in '88 not long before 4.0 and GS/OS.

The modern updates to Apple II Desktop are quite good if you haven't seen them. 1.3 I think was just released not long ago.
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
I had wanted to do a comprehensive overview of the various versions of the Apple IIgs System Software, similar to what was done on the Amiga Workbench Nostalgia site and various sites for Macs (ex: the old Mac512k site). Problem is there doesn't appear to be any detailed documentation/change logs for all the versions. Here is what I could find as "official" releases.

System 1.0: Initial 1986 pack-in release with MouseDesk.
System 1.1: Bugfix?
System 2.0: 1987 pack-in release for ROM 01 machines. Still MouseDesk based.
System 3.0: Doesn't appear to have been publicly distributed.
System 3.1: Initial release with the 16-bit IIgs Finder.
System 3.2: Bug-fixes. Last version that boots on ROM 00 and uses ProDOS 16.
System 4.0: Initial GS/OS release. Packed in with 1988 machines.
System 5.0: Initial release for the ROM 03 IIgs.
System 5.0.1: Doesn't appear to have been publicly distributed.
System 5.0.2: Bugfix
System 5.0.3: Released and immediately pulled due to showstopper bugs.
System 5.0.4: Bugfix
System 6.0: Major boxed retail release
System 6.0.1: Last official Apple release.

It also required 512KB to work. Something that people who bought the Stealth GS upgrade kit for the //e didn't get, whereas normal IIgs machines came with the memory expansion card preinstalled when GS/OS was officially released to the public. So, people like me had to use ProDOS 16 on our ROM 01 IIgs upgrade kit machines until we upgraded to more than 256KB.
I'm amazed anyone actually tried to use native IIgs software with only 256k of RAM. Almost all commercial software released requires 512k minimum.
 

volvo242gt

Well-known member
I had wanted to do a comprehensive overview of the various versions of the Apple IIgs System Software, similar to what was done on the Amiga Workbench Nostalgia site and various sites for Macs (ex: the old Mac512k site). Problem is there doesn't appear to be any detailed documentation/change logs for all the versions. Here is what I could find as "official" releases.

System 1.0: Initial 1986 pack-in release with MouseDesk.
System 1.1: Bugfix?
System 2.0: 1987 pack-in release for ROM 01 machines. Still MouseDesk based.
System 3.0: Doesn't appear to have been publicly distributed.
System 3.1: Initial release with the 16-bit IIgs Finder.
System 3.2: Bug-fixes. Last version that boots on ROM 00 and uses ProDOS 16.
System 4.0: Initial GS/OS release. Packed in with 1988 machines.
System 5.0: Initial release for the ROM 03 IIgs.
System 5.0.1: Doesn't appear to have been publicly distributed.
System 5.0.2: Bugfix
System 5.0.3: Released and immediately pulled due to showstopper bugs.
System 5.0.4: Bugfix
System 6.0: Major boxed retail release
System 6.0.1: Last official Apple release.


I'm amazed anyone actually tried to use native IIgs software with only 256k of RAM. Almost all commercial software released requires 512k minimum.
Ok, must've been 1.1 that I had. Got it from a friend with a ROM 00 Woz IIgs back in '89. Currently have 3.1 and 5.0.

Surprisingly, a lot of the software I had did work, it's just that System 4.0 and higher won't boot without extra RAM. Even Paintworks Plus worked with 256K.
 
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