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From: AWCTTYPA@UIAMVS.BITNET ("David A. Lyons")
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: A Fool in the Rain (unhappy with the GS)
Message-ID: <8902230420.aa00964@SMOKE.BRL.MIL>
Date: 24 Feb 89 20:09:14 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
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X-Unparsable-Date: Thursday 23 Feb 89 3:20 AM CT

>Date:         Wed, 22 Feb 89 16:22:00 EST
>From:         CHEESEBALL%ALBION.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>Subject:      Fool In the Rain
>
>Lord knows that fools come in many shapes and forms, and that there
>are many around this land of ours, but I never thought I'd see the
>day where I WOULD SAY THIS:  Apple made a sucker out of me!  I've had
>my GS for 2 years and 2 months and I've yet to get much out of it!

I see things from a very different perspective.  I've been working
with the GS since about June 86, and I've had my own for 2 years now.
I've become extremely familiar with the toolbox and GS/OS in that
time, and the excitement I've had for it from the beginning from a
programmer's point of view is higher than ever, as you know if you've
been following my recent posts.

Do you subscribe to GEnie or AppleLink--Personal Edition?  If not,
consider giving them a try.  You may be missing out on a lot of
public domain or Shareware stuff.  People complain about a lot of
things on the commercial services, but one thing I've never seen
anybody say there is that they haven't gotten much out of their GS.

>As a business machine, basically the best you can do is AppleWorks
>2.0 (unless you have the patience of 10 dead men)

I use AppleWorks quite a bit.  Is that bad?  It goes 2.5 times
faster than on a IIe, and all the GS memory is available for big
files.  Plus I have desk accessories always available, and a
detached keyboard & mouse control.

>and as a game machine, the thing is a poor man's Amiga.

I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the Amiga.  Are you
calling it a game machine?  I'm not noted for spending extreme
amounts of time playing games, but I've bought Zany Golf, Shanghai,
and Tetris, and I'm reasonably happy with them.  Have you tried
those?  I don't know what kind of games you want.  There's a slick
public domain Yahtzee and a Shareware Solitaire that I use, too.

>GOD IS THIS THING SLOW!  I've never seen a machine as slow in
>performing the things IT IS DESIGNED TO DO!

Not all the software is slow, but too much of it is.  One thing you
can do is order a TransWarp GS (see below).  Another is to wait for
more improvements in software speed (both system software and
application software), which I'm confident will be forthcoming.

>[...] We have to wait about six eons just for an operating system
>that is still too slow and quite confusing to learn.

What is confusing about GS/OS?  I'll do my best to resolve any
confusion.

GS/OS is a major improvement over ProDOS 16, both in speed and
otherwise.  How fast would it have to be to make you happy?  What
kind of disk drives are you using?  (If you're using Apple 3.5
drives, have you formatted your GS/OS disks with a 2:1 interleave?
GS/OS can read them considerably faster if you do.)

>When I first got the machine, I read Trip Hawkins' summary of the GS'
>abilities: "GS stands for 'graphics that are static'."  Well, he was
>right.

Are you talking about static in the sound output?  I have a pair of
Radio Shack Minimus 0.6 speakers plugged into mine, and I have no
complaints about the sound quality.  (I even have a fan, which
doesn't seem to cause a problem.)

>I would have written this letter though if it wasn't for one little
>thing that happened over Christmas.  I came back from my vacation to
>discover that my battery had died.  My "10-YEAR" battery was dead at
>the ripe old age of slightly over two years.

Too bad.  If you don't want to pay your dealer to fix it, replace it
with a couple of double-A batteries in series.  (You might just cut
one of the battery's leads, or unsolder one of them, and leave the
battery in there--don't just throw it away, because it'll explode
when it gets wet.  It has lithium in it.)

>I have little software after two years, and Trip Hawkins' lovely
>company (Electronic Arts) has been saying for these last two years
>that they will release a program called EARL WEAVER BASEBALL and then
>denying that they will release it.  C'mon people stop with the lies.
>Last year at this time, I got a call from their head of Customer
>Service swearing that it would be out in the spring of '88 for the
>GS.  Well it isn't.
>
>I'm guessing that there's two reasons for it.  1) the program was
>slower than a dead turtle in molasses during a Nebraskan december
>because of the 2.8MhZ clockspeed [...]  2) No one buys GS software.
>Is that a pair of good enough reasons?

Good enough reasons for lying?  No.  I doubt that they deliberately
lied to you, though.  Vaporware is not unique to the GS, nor is it a
new thing.  They may have decided to give other projects higher
priority--I don't know.  The moral is not to count on stuff until
you see it, I guess.  I haven't paid enough attention to Electronic
Arts to know whether their promises of future release dates are
generally good or not.

A 2.8 MHz clock speed alone doesn't make a program slow--it may mean
a lot more work is required to make it fast, though.  "No one buys GS
software"?  I disagree...I've bought some.  Do you mean that people
you know have stolen the commercial software they use rather than
buying it?  If so, encourage them to buy their software.  If it's
worth using, it's worth paying for.

>Well, I'm NOT GOING TO suggest how to improve the GS.  It's bloody
>simple: add a coupla graphics modes, and beef up the speed
>tremendously (basically treble the clock speed).

Yeah, it's simple to say, isn't it?  As long as we're talking about
making it faster, why not make it a BILLION times faster?  That
would really be slick, although it's easier said than done.

How will adding more graphics modes help?  You want lower resolution
than 320x200?

When throwing around MHz figures, remember that the clock speed
determines the number of clock cycles per second, _not_ the number of
instruction cycles per second.  That's a lot more complicated, and it
depends on the particular instructions being executed--but on the
average, a 65816 (GS) instruction takes roughly half as many clock
cycles as a 68000 (Macintosh) instruction.

Problems in boosting the clock rate _include_ finding 65816s that
work reliably at higher speeds, and either buying more expensive
memory chips with faster access times, or implementing some sort of
caching scheme to let the processor spend as little of its time as
possible waiting for bytes to get fetched from memory.

The TransWarp GS should be shipping shortly if it isn't already.
I'll be interested to find out how they dealt with some of the
problems.

>                                                Dave Srinivasan
>                                                CHEESEBALL@ALBION

 --David A. Lyons              bitnet: awcttypa@uiamvs
   DAL Systems                 CompuServe:  72177,3233
   P.O. Box 287                GEnie mail:    D.LYONS2
   North Liberty, IA 52317     AppleLinkPE: Dave Lyons