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Comment by lawtguy | Hacker News Reader

Apple did make a machine comparable to the Amiga 500, the Apple IIGS: http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html. Similar in graphics and sound ability along with GUI OS and full Apple IIe emulation. It was certainly capable of playing great games: I spent many fun hours playing Dungeon Master on my IIGS.

It was pretty much a cheaper color Mac that gave Apple II users a straight-forward upgrade path and was great at games to boot. But I guess Apple didn't think any of that was important to selling computers.

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The Apple IIGS is/was nothing like an Amiga 500 in terms of capabilities.

The CPU was pretty much intentionally underpowered to avoid eating into Mac sales. It was ludicrously priced. Graphics wise it lacked hardware sprites, as well as support functionality equivalent to the copper and blitter. Add in a primitive OS, and it was DOA everywhere but the US

(while the Amiga, ironically, was DOA in the US largely because Commodore had a decade of mismanaging their US distribution chain and marketing; Commodore US didn't think any of that was important to selling computers).

This is true in terms of graphics but in terms of sound, the IIGS was better.

Also, the OS had some neat stuff like File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats.

> but in terms of sound

That may be so, but that's also pretty much it. Then again, for that price you could buy an Amiga 500 and a synth :D

(amusingly, Ensoniq was founded by ex Commodore/MOS engineers, including Bob Yannes, who created the SID chip found in the C64)

> File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats.

Just like the Amiga. There's dozens of filesystem implementations for the Amiga - you just drop a device file in the right directory, and add a very simple configuration.

E.g. here's a small selection from Aminet: http://aminet.net/search?query=filesystem

There's even at least one editor (FrexxEd) that exposed it's currently open buffers as files in a filesystem (so you can e.g. run your compiler directly on the editors buffer without going via a temp file, and have the compiler output go directly to another buffer, without any explicit support in the editor)

Between the ancient Apple IIs at my elementary and middle school, and the jump to Amigas and 386-class PCs, I totally missed out on the IIGS, thinking it was just a slight upgrade to the Apple II computers I remember. Recently I was trolling around retrocomputer forums and came across the /r/apple2 and was blown away by some of the IIGS stuff I saw there. Easily the equal capability-wise to the Amiga, Atari ST or Acorn Archimedes.

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple2

Pertinent link: http://www.freetoolsassociation.com

Click on '2GS Best of' and then 'Demos' to see some of the IIGS demos.

Also : http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Apple+II+GS&pag...

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