Welcome to a special extra episode of Open Apple! Fellow Apple II enthusiast Matt Ownby recently sat down for a chat with John Brooks, author of Rastan on the IIgs. It’s a fascinating conversation with tons of technical detail that you won’t want to miss. They talk copy protection, cycle counting, fast GS sprite rendering, and lots more!
A huge thanks to John for taking the time to share his knowledge. Also a huge thanks to Matt for recording this and allowing us to air it on Open Apple.
There are some audio quality issues with this piece, but we feel the conversation is well worth it. Enjoy, and send a thanks to Matt and John!
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Tags: Apple IIGS, copy protection, Daphne emulator, John Brooks, laserdisc games, Matt Ownby, Rastan
1 Comment to 'Open Apple #47.5 (June 2015) : John Brooks via Matt Ownby'
Jun 2, 2015 7:48 PM
Great interview with a genuine programming hero! He’s got some pretty amazing memories of this stuff.
But of course, I’m going to have to nitpick. There were actually 3 different 3.5″ external drives: the beige original that shipped early ’86 with the Mac Plus (it has no daisy-chain connector on the back), the white “UniDisk 3.5” for the IIe/IIc (this is the one with the embedded 6502, and it did NOT work with the Mac), and the platinum IIgs/Mac “Apple 3.5 Drive”. This last one is the one that the IWM controls low-level because the IIgs is fast enough at 2.8 MHz to handle it.
GS/OS in Systems 5 and 6 actually *did* use a lot of the fast paths John was talking about. In particular, both the 3.5″ driver and QuickDraw II got significantly faster in System 5.0 and they further improved things in 6.0. 6.0.1 can read every sector of a track in one disk rotation at peak throughput, for instance. John can be forgiven for not knowing that since it appears he was doing SNES full-time by 1991 though.
As far as significant post-Rastan games on the GS, I’m going to have to name Out Of This World.