Oh man... That's the sort of thing that would keep me up at night.

Stop with the hindsight, this will eventually turn you into entry level hoarders, which is a very easy slippery slop down...

@@XenonG and it's an easy way to slip into a brain loop of sunken cost fallacy.

I don't, as a permanent solution because it might come undone leading to all kinds of problems. But I love it as a way to get the video done and revisit the question of RAM later. There ARE RAM cards that will fit. I've probably got one here I can offer Sean in a small trade (souvenir!) but seems he doesn't strictly need one by the time I could get it to him. Might offer anyway because I don't need this one and it's the perfect period-correct card for his machine.

Could you show us it in a video please?

Make a vid of this sounds cool.

I don't know if such a board design exists or not. If not I would be happy to help make one. It "should" only take five minutes.

Jobs had nothing to do with it. He left long before it was even released. People need to stop blaming Jobs for everything that happened within Apple between 1985 and 1997.

@@kirishima638 Incomplete picture there son. jobs came back, was put in charge of the mac division, and was essentially hooking everything through to the mac division so he might nto have had the CEO title, but he had become defacto head by virtue of the Mac being apple's tentpole. Up to and including convincing apple to cripple the GS's clock so that it wouldn't be seen as 'too good' compared to the mac.

@@singletona082 What are you talking about, son. The IIGS was discontinued in 1992 while Jobs was at Next. He came to Apple in 1997. Jobs had nothing, nothing to do with the Apple II after he left in 1985. The IIGS was introduced a full year later.

@@kirishima638 It's simple. You're misrepresenting events either intentionally to big up the myth of st jobs, or out of ignorance.

@@singletona082 What exactly did I get wrong? That Jobs left Apple in '85 and only returned in '97? That's a fact. That the IIGS was introduced in late '86 and discontinued in '92? That's a fact.

There is one.. and Sean is looking for it.. so you can fully lose your mind....

Nah, just CPU upgrades like ZipChip or Transwarp that would speed things up to 9mhz or 14mhz on the very high end, I think. The closest thing would be the Apple II add-in card Apple made for some Macs like the LC so schools could still run their old Apple II software on Macs.

@@morecrappysketches The Apple IIe PDS card will only slot into an LC or Performa with an LC PDS slot. Essentially it is a whole Apple IIe that sits on one small card and was used for education, primarily trying to get schools with Apple IIs onto Macintosh platform, and have a 2 computers in one. Unfortunately, you cannot place this into an Apple IIe, although the idea would be great!

MPW C and Pascal were available for the IIGS. I did plenty of Pascal development on the //e and IIGS back in the day, even old UCSD Pascal on a ][ Plus. What would a dedicated SFR bring to the table?

@@orbitalgolem91 And yet it didn't have a dedicated stack frame register so was using kludge code generation to support call stack languages (larger code, less efficient address ability). On the MC68000, there were oodles of registers - definitely a stack frame register convention, same address-ability to 16MB of memory as the 65816 and 80286, same capability for 16-bit multiply/div, and convenient 32-bit registers for 32-bit add/sub, as well address pointer arithmetic, making it feasible to conveniently walk through data buffers larger than 64K. It was certainly a complete breath of fresh air relative to the 6502 and 8088/86, or Z80. The 65816 coming out on hardware in the same time frame - well, the market place tells that story.

Another strange thing with the IIgs: The 640 video mode has differently 'sized' pixels for even and odd columns (can be seen in the monochrome mode on a sharp display). This will result in slightly different colors on neighbouring columns when the colors are 'mixed' on the GSOS desktop. You can see this happening with the light grey line in the drive icon. the drive icon itself and the lighter line are both black&white columns but 1 pixel shifted. Sadly this can only be observed on real CRTs since these are analog-effects. The mixing is most likely facilitated by the lowpass filter (possibly even the RGB-transistors) in the CRT.

8bit and 640kilo-bit ought to be enough for everybody.... (C) somebody from the greatest tech leaders in 1980x //** sarcasm **//

I can't see how that would have worked out for them. The IIgs was built on a decade-old technological legacy, and the updates they made for the platform weren't even enough to make it competitive with the other 16-bit platforms of the time. Macintosh was a clean break from that legacy, and while it was a very expensive machine, it was actually some of the best home computer gear of its time. The 65816 was a nice development for extending 6502 machines but it was otherwise a dead-end. The 68000 was more like a starting point and led to much more capable versions - full 32-bit CPUs like the 68030. (And Macintosh moved on to the PowerPC, of course...) The Apple II was so rooted in its own, specific hardware that it couldn't really make that kind of transition and still be the machine it was.

@@tetsujin_144 Same way Microsoft continuously extended the PC, keeping backwards compatibility but pushing it forward Apple did the braver, cooler thing by making a clean break but it wasn't as successful for obvious reasons

Oh wow what an interesting idea! Have any pics?

I been studying the history of Apple recently this is interesting to learn about cause it seems like the perfect compromise between Apple II and Macintosh with II’s expandability and Macintosh’s accessibility all while being extremely powerful.

That claim is made a lot and I don't think it's truly substantiated. For instance, WIkipedia says it was an intentional choice, to keep it from competing with the mac... But the two articles it cites to support this assertion are fan articles written in the 2010s. One of them says "The 68C816S design runs at up to 14 MHz" - The 65816 is still manufactured today, and that is true - for the *current* version of the part. *Not* the ones made in 1986. The other says "the processor could easily go up to 16 Mhz but the supplier, for lack of suitable test means, only certifying it up to 4 Mhz" - It doesn't really matter *why* the manufacturer wouldn't rate their CPUs to higher than 4MHz. If the part is rated for 4MHz, it'd be stupid to run it faster than that. By running the parts out-of-spec, virtually anything that might go wrong with them later would be by default Apple's fault. And if you compare the IIgs (2.8MHz) to, say, the Amiga (7MHz) - The Amiga has a faster clock speed but the 65816 CPU takes less time per instruction. The Amiga is not exactly a CPU powerhouse either. Its strength is more in its chipset: hardware scrolling, hardware sprites, hardware blitter, hardware co-processor. Through that chipset, the Amiga can do more not *because* of its CPU, but rather completely *independently* of its CPU. The IIgs has none of that, its performance is completely dictated by its CPU, and by that 1MHz bottleneck. The fact that IIgs fans are willing to endlessly propagate this claim without substantiating it, and despite the evidence to the contrary is kind of irresponsible, to say the least. Maybe it's the story that makes you feel good about your favorite computer, but I don't think it's the truth.

If a guy has one 816 that can run at 6MHz... That's cool. Like a novelty, a curiosity, a fun piece of demo tech. If a company is prepared to sell a couple million 816'es, and they're willing to promise you that they'll definitely work reliably at 6MHz... *That* could be enough to make it worth designing a machine that uses that CPU at that speed.

Anecdotally, I've heard that a lot of dedicated IIGS peripheral cards were designed expecting the higher-profile case. Which, of course, is exactly what Sean experienced here with the RAM upgrade that didn't fit without a bodge. So you'd wind up taking a working IIe out of commission for an incomplete IIGS that wasn't even guaranteed to fit devices designed for it. Not really surprising that people weren't champing at the bit for the upgrade.