How does the Apple IIGS compare to the Amiga and the Atari ST?

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Consistent_Cat7541@reddit

Not well. The IIgs was intentionally crippled by Apple to not compete with the Mac. The Amiga has a much more robust OS (and was extensively used for video production for years). Atari had much better support MIDI support, and was used in publishing and music. The IIgs did so poorly that the IIe stayed on the market longer.

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justeUnMec@reddit

Apple had an option with the IIGS (or at least the IIx) to adopt what Acorn did when they transitioned from 6502. Acorn demonstrated the ARM CPU to the Apple II team, and showed a lowish cost ARM powered machine with a GUI aimed at their education market in the UK, running a fast emulation of the 6502 based BBC Micro. I believe this was squashed as it would have eaten into the more expensive Mac market.

Apple and Acorn appear to have had some shared interests for a few years, which I guess led to the ARM spinoff and adoption of this chip in the Newton and eMate, as well as their educational co-venture in the UK, Xemplar.

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FuckIPLaw@reddit

Makes you wonder what might have been. A machine like that would have eaten the more expensive Mac market, but there's a good chance it also would have eaten the even more expensive IBM PC and clone market.

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aardvarkjedi@reddit

The issue with the 68K architecture scaling wasn’t technical. Its volumes weren’t as great as the x86, so Motorola didn’t have the resources Intel had to invest in speeding up the architecture.

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FuckIPLaw@reddit

Wait, really? My understanding was it was initially more powerful than early x86 chips but later, improved versions like the 68030 just didn't get as much of a boost as improved x86 chips and later macs and amigas fell behind in performance as a result.

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aardvarkjedi@reddit

Yes, because Motorola couldn’t keep up with the money Intel was able to put into improving the x86. The volume of PC clones sold far outnumbered Macs, Amigas, and others using the 68K.

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Stoney3K@reddit

And let's not forget that the PC and x86 in general is a terribly inefficiënt architecture because it was not designed for speed, but for versatility. And Intel's solution was not to optimize it but just to throw more transistors and higher clocks at it. They could take advantage of Moore's Law because they had the resources to spin up new chip fabs at an insanely fast rate.

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ResponsibilityNo7189@reddit

inefficiënt : sounds like an IKEA furniture :P

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canthearu_ack@reddit

Motorola didn't sell nearly as much 68K chips as intel sold x86 chips.

Because of this, when a successor to the 68060 was to be designed, Motorola decided to join with PowerPC and move to a more RISC based instruction set.

Intel on the other hand, continued to re-engineer their x86, developing the Pentium Pro architecture. This implemented a translation layer that converted x86 CISC instructions to micro-op's, which are like RISC instructions. Then the rest of the Pentium Pro backend was more like a RISC processor.

Motorola didn't want to spend the development resources doing that, and just partnered with IBM to create the PowerPC architecture.

One thing that often gets overlooked in why Intel x86 chips have managed to stay so competitive in a world with RISC processors, is that x86 code is actually pretty memory efficient. This saves space in the instruction cache and the performance speedup from that helps offset the power/performance price of using a translation layer inside the CPU.

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canthearu_ack@reddit

Just to continue my rambling:

One of the problems with the companies using 68K processors was that they were really slow to incoporate faster processors in their end products.

While with Intel x86 processors, manufacturers were basically clambering and usually ready to ship products in volume with a new processor day 1.

With Amiga and Machintosh, there was no point Motorola pushing clock speeds hard because you had to wait for Commodore/Apple to make a new model of computer to install these processors into.

It got a little better with the PowerPC and Apple, but still nothing like the furor that we saw with the Pentium/Pentium II/Pentium III and Athlon CPUs.

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flatfisher@reddit

It got a little better with the PowerPC and Apple

Maybe I only remember Apple marketing material but didn't the G3 and G4 line perform relatively for a few years well compared to Pentium I/II/III, even at lower clocks?

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canthearu_ack@reddit

It did, and Apple were releasing new models quickly to take advantage of the cadence of higher clock speed parts.

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2raysdiver@reddit

With x86 CPUs, PC manufacturers saw each other as the competition. Apple only saw the Apple II and Mac as the competition to the IIgs. Ironically, Apple fell into the same trap that they themselves despised (internally, at least) about IBM and other large computer manufacturers of the time. Technological history is littered with examples of technologically superior but crippled products because a company was afraid of stealing sales from a more lucrative (but aging) product line.

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refuge9@reddit

Don’t forget, with x86 you not only had more volume for sales, but also other players in the c86 space that were helping push that CPU vs intels offerings, Cyrix, AMD, IBM, Zilog, NEC, Harris, Texas Instruments, Rise Technology, NexGen, IIT, VLSI, Siemens, Centaur, National Semiconductor, and VIA Technologies all at one time or another made some x86 compatible chips. It’s not until the P4 days that we got stuck with only the Intel/AMD duo. ( parts of Cyrix kinda lived on in AMD Geode for a long time, and Centaur kinda still lives today inside VIA tech, though only for low powered uses).

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2raysdiver@reddit

As it was, the BBC Micro had a 6502 and a dedicated graphical chipset using the same chip in the IBM CGA (but to much better effect). We were commissioned to port our Apple software to the BBC Micro and that ended up being my job. It was a noticeably faster PC than the Apple. The 6502 in the Apple II only had access to RAM for half it's cycles as the other half was dedicated to video refresh. This resulted in about an average of a 1/3 loss in performance.

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justeUnMec@reddit

It was designed based on a specification wirtten for a competitive process by BBC engineers, I suspect there was a bias toward broadcastable graphics capabilities, along with things like the analog port for classroom experimentation, for the educational and scientific market they were aiming for but also they'd have been thinking about visual demos for the planned TV programmes they were developing. There was also a seperate chip for a teletext graphics mode which was a pain to programme in as it used a different character set that didn't match the keyboard, but very memory efficient.

The beeb was well engineered by Cambridge grads, and the operating system had quite a useful API. Also the BASIC had nice features like functions and vector mathematics on whole arrays as well as the inline assembler. I do think Wilson was the British Wozniak, they both worked with the 6502 and a version of BASIC; Wilson took that experience and developed the ARM; I wrote my first ARM assembler as a teenager on an Acorn and there'll be a few people of my age who rememebr learning about RISC and ARM because of these machines.

Given the BBC's faster performance, the fact they created an emulator that could run on the new ARM machine and was integrated to the OS and included with every machine, as well as the same BASIC ported to ARM, meant that schools could use existing educational software but also demonstrated a template that the Apple II team could have followed.

But the more important legacy is the Raspberry Pi which is very much inspired by Acorn and has sold tens of millions more than either them, or Apple II!

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2raysdiver@reddit

Yeah, the inline assembler was awesome and ran as fast, if not faster than compiled assembler on the Apple. And it allowed direct access to the ports on the graphics chip, too, which I was already familiar with from writing assembler for the IBM PC. In all, it was one of the easiest development environments I've ever worked with. IBM PC's CGA would have been much better if they had implemented it the way BBC did.

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Kab00m-Kap0w@reddit

I thought the IIx was going to be the successor to the IIGS. Or was it the more powerful version that was scaled down?

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Zalenka@reddit

I can't see how anything was actually programmed on the amiga as the sdk looks like it sucks. Was everything assembly and programmed the actual chips?

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mines-a-pint@reddit

Opposite: it had many rich-featured dynamically loaded libraries for IO, UI, multitasking, graphics etc. C was popular, but assembly was also. Games and demos often ‘hit the hardware’ (and thus created compatibility issues with later models) but the standard programming APIs used by other apps, and many games, were great.

Source: I used C on the Amiga through my comp-sci uni days, when it saved me many trips to the lab to use horrible IBM PCs or over-booked Solaris workstations.

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Zalenka@reddit

is there a good idea for it?

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mines-a-pint@reddit

Do you mean programming docs?

The RKMs (ROM Kernel Manuals) were what we used; they are around in various digital forms, e.g. from http://amigadev.elowar.com/

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Zalenka@reddit

I mean IDE but it auto-corrected. C is preferred.

Thanks

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mines-a-pint@reddit

I don't do it myself these days, but this thread has some useful information: https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1b80zyy/software_development_for_the_amiga/

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Stoney3K@reddit

Which was pretty much the same predicament the C128 was in, which was intentionally crippled to not compete with the Amiga.

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stalkythefish@reddit

I don't think this is true. The C128 was designed well before Commodore acquired Amiga Corp.

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Stoney3K@reddit

There's a really good video where Bil Herd and Jack Tramiel talk about what issues they were facing with the C128. On the one hand it was a bad decision to use a Z80 for business apps (they probably were not aware that the x86 would take off like a rocket) and on the other hand the 128 hit the market late and was screwed over by Commodore corporate higher-ups. It was competing with both the Amiga and their own PC clones.

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2raysdiver@reddit

This exactly. It was a faster Apple II, but it hadn't kept up with improvements of either Mac or 80386 PCs released around the same time. The iigs came along TEN years after the Apple II. That was an incredibly long time to wait, even back then. IBM PC based on 8086 was out in 1981, skipped 80186 and 80286-based PC/AT came out in 1984. 80386 based PCs arrived in 1986, and Apple was finally rolling out a better Apple II in the gs. It was simply too little, too late. There was very little software written that could take advantage of it's capabilities. Where I worked we still had to write for the Apple II because that was where most of our customer base was.

The 65816 CPU in the gs was clocked near 3MHz, I think but was capable of 8MHz or more. There were accelerator cards that ran up to 16MHz with memory cache that were lightening fast.

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InsaneGuyReggie@reddit

There were a few 186 powered IBM clones, though not very many.

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2raysdiver@reddit

True, but IBM itself passed on the 80186.

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InsaneGuyReggie@reddit

They sure did. IIRC, the 286 came out pretty soon after and it had protected mode so why not?

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DECmasterrace@reddit

"even back then" -> especially back then. In the past ten years we have gone from Windows 10 to Windows 11. From Apple II (1977) to IIgs (1986) they went from no GUI, no OS, no FP, no disk storage (only cassette), no mouse, to all of the above. And Apple II itself was a major breakthrough from less than 2 years earlier when they had no video and no keyboard, and linear power supplies.

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2raysdiver@reddit

Very true. Although by "no OS" I assume you mean no graphical OS. DOS was a command line OS. There are those of us old enough to make that distinction. But I was thinking more in terms processor performance. While the original Apple II CPU was clocked a 1MHz, the iigs was still limited to around 3MHz. The CPU in the GPU itself was rated for up to 8MHz and the spec allowed for up to 15 or 16MHz.

But yes, there was a lot of innovation in that 10 year period. But the IIgs was only catching up to it. Drives were still external, HDDs were still an expensive option and the 3.5" diskette was still the main load source for many IIgs's. For most people it was still just a faster Apple II with a nicer keyboard. I was an Apple developer at the time and we were incredibly excited about it. We even had a prototype IIgs in an Apple IIe case to play with for a year before the announcement. IIRC it might have been clocked faster than what was finally released.

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burritoresearch@reddit

The very first 80386 available were astonishingly expensive, it wasn't until 1989 or 1990 that ordinary people could afford them. The IIgs would be more in competition in price with 12MHz 80286 and similar.

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nickIncDN@reddit

It’s a really minor point which always grates me a little when I see it.

The Atari ST didn’t have “much better MIDI support”, it was just a low cost first mover (1985) and included MIDI ports so got the jump on music sequencing.

It was a smart move by Atari, but that’s all it was.

The Mac and Amiga were just as good at it and the ports were cheap.

Thinking about it now, the Amiga may have been better given its multitasking.

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tes_kitty@reddit

The Amiga had real, preemptive Multitasking. Something we take for granted today, but back then it was a first on such a small computer system.

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Saix856@reddit

From my understanding the Macintosh competition thing is a myth. Apparently the 65C816 CPUs at the time had bugs and issues that only went away with lower clock speeds. Plus, if they used a faster CPU they’d need to upgrade the RAM too which would’ve raised costs

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hanz333@reddit

This was still the case many years later when Nintendo choose the 65C816 for the SNES. Nintendo got a little more speed out of it by using variable-speeds to work around hardware limitations on access-cycles, but still had timing issues if ramped up.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

If I remember correctly, I think Nintendo went this route with the 65C816 because it had hardware compatibility with the 6502, and they originally wanted to make the SNES backwards compatible with the original NES.

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hanz333@reddit

It's speculated that's the case, and it likely would work, but I actually think the biggest reason they stuck to 6502 was that they already had teams who knew the 6502 assembly code intimately, they already had a relationship with Ricoh, and they already knew how to get custom chips working in the architecture -- so they figured any limitations they had could be overcome (which was fairly accurate).

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phire@reddit

More importantly, there just wen't that many other options out there.

Unlike Sega, who just slapped a stock 68000 on their PCB, Nintendo wanted a small CPU core they could embed into their own custom silicon.

There is no sign that Motorola was even offering the 68000 as an option for embedding at the time. And it was quite a bit bigger, I'm not sure it would have fit in Nintendo's silicon budget.

Other than the 65C816, there just isn't much else suitable from the 16bit era. The only other option I can think of is the NEC V20/V30 (an enhanced clone of the 8088/8086), they were clearly open to licensing it out. A few years later and a higher silicon budget and the obvious option would have been an early ARM or even the a MIPS R3000 design (like the ps1).

There is a reason why almost all 16bit consoles and most 16bit home computers used the 68000.

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Saix856@reddit

Yeah. Mix that in with the other aspects of the SNES design and you got a genuine PITA to code for on your hands.

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phire@reddit

It's very important to realise that the 6502 style bus does quite a bit more work per cycle than the 6800 and 8080 style buses.

On a 6502 bus, memory is accessed once per cycle. On 6800/8080 memory is only accessed once every 4 cycles (at the most).

So if you just look at memory access speed, that 2.8mHz is actually running at the equivalent of 11.2Mhz, faster than the 7.8Mhz of the Macintosh. And so the IIGs actually needs to use faster DRAM, 150ns vs the 200ns DRAM used on the Macintosh.

This isn't to say that a 2.8mHz 65C816 is actually faster than a 7.8Mhz 68000... it's not. The 68000 can access twice as much data (16bits vs 8bits) for each memory access. And when it's not memory bound, it can actually use those extra cycles to do more ALU work.

But even if it wasn't for the 65C816 yield issues and bugs, they couldn't push it much further as faster DRAM was expensive, and I don't think you couldn't get anything faster than 100ns at the time (we can only really go down to about 60ns these days, and we relying entirely on wider transfers and internal caches to get more speed)

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Im_100percent_human@reddit

When both the ST and Amiga came out, both were more advanced that the Mac.

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justeUnMec@reddit

The IIGS was at most 16 bit using a simple processor that was an evolution of the 6502, whereas the Amiga and Atari had a CPU with internal 32 bit capabilities and a more advanced instruction set.

Having said that, compared to the Atari and Amiga keyboard-style machines, the IIGS had more expansion slots and could take advantage of Apple II cards and the existing software for the Apple II, as well as hardware designed for the MAc like ADB keybaords etc. It also had a Mac-like UI and Apple ported software like Hypercard to it.

Also, the IIGS has the added cool factor for being the last machine Steve Wozniak was actively involved in the development of!

But I guess a lot more Ataris and Amigas were sold so those platforms had more longevity.

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Im_100percent_human@reddit

At the time, the Atari ST and Amiga were hot machines. They were considered much cooler than the IIGS.

I am not sure that more Atari ST and Amiga sold more than the Apple IIGS. A LOT of schools bought into the IIGS, as a compatible follow-on to their extensive II+ and IIe collections. I am pretty sure the IIGS outsold the ST and Amiga by a lot.

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justeUnMec@reddit

A lot in the US maybe, but I don't think it had much success anywhere else? As far as I can see they produced maybe a million on the IIGS platform, there were more Amigas sold than that in the UK let alone worldwide. There was limited educational market for the IIGS in Europe, the II was not competitively priced so didn't achieve success in that sector and they didn't have the backing of local education projects like the BBC and similar machines had at the time. Apple didn't really enter the educational sector here until the LC series made outfitting a whole classroom of machines cheaper.

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EarHealthHelp1@reddit

Oh that reminded me! You could get a Wozniak edition version of the IIgs. The name “Wozniak Edition” was printed on the front of the case. If there were any hardware differences I don’t know about them. A classroom in my school had a couple of them.

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Stoney3K@reddit

The Woz edition was identical to every other IIgs aside from the autograph on the case.

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Fleischer444@reddit

The Amiga 2000,3000 and 4000 had room for multiple expansion slots.

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justeUnMec@reddit

At the price point of the IIGS it was competing with the more common keyboard style machines like the A500.

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TooManyBulborbs@reddit

ADB was created for the Apple IIgs and was later brought over to the Macintosh for the Mac SE and Mac II, not the other way around.

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justeUnMec@reddit

I know, but it still meant that because of that wider adoption it had a good range of accessories available through it.

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oxwilder@reddit

Man I miss my IIgs for gaming. It was souped up with 1.25 MEGAbytes of ram. Essentially a government supercomputer.

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TableDuck@reddit

I have often had this “what if?” scenario in my head. I went from the Apple II+ to a PC, but that 1986-1990 era is something I wish I had participated in.

I came to the conclusion that: I would have loved geeking out on the IIGS - for about a month.

I would have loved geeking out on the Amiga for years.

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hdufort@reddit

Video modes, CPU instruction set, overall architecture are a bit backwards.

The CPU is a 8-bit CPU with 16-bit extensions. It is a clever design but cannot compete with a M68k.

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Solitaire0199@reddit

Sound: Much better sound than Amiga or Atari ST.
Graphics: IIGS has the edge with max colours at lower resolutions but lacks the coprocessors to push pixels/sprites fast. Still, stuff can look super pretty.
Performance: It's slow as molasses without acceleration but quite performant when accelerated.
Expansion: In its own way, comparable or even superior to wedge formfactor Amigas and STs -- not just in terms of expansion slots, but things like external devices (SmartPort, ADB).
Quantity of titles: Highly inferior
Quality of titles: As a percentage of its library, here's where the IIGS excels. It has the definitive versions of several classic games, especially from Interplay, thanks to Rebecca Heineman and Brian Fargo. Hands-down best versions of the Bard's Tales, Neuromancer, Dragon Wars, and several others - again, especially if accelerated.

I love mine, as I do my Amiga and ST.

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siliconlore@reddit

In many ways the IIgs was a good system but like the Commodore 128, there wasn't much native software written because the backwards compatability was so good. Why write a special IIgs version when the IIe version will run? It has decent sound capability but nothing magical in the graphics department.

The Amiga had excellent custom chips for games and graphics and the ST was better than the Macintosh for hires B&W and had good color game support. The 68000 CPU was much better than the 65C816 and Apple had crippled the CPU speed on purpose.

The IIgs with the RGB color monitor is the absolute best IIe you can have but it never could play ball with the competion and the IBM PC began to control the business market that Apple had orginally created.

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No_Transportation_77@reddit

Heck, the 68000 was in a lot of senses a 32-bit CPU.

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Important-Bed-48@reddit

I was an Amiga guy and it was my computer but I owned all 3 at one point. I got the apple iigs from a school that was literally throwing it away and the ST I bought for $75 used. The Iigs had hard drive and an accelerator card. It had a perfect version of wolfenstein which played faster than a friends 486 and the os looked very similar to Mac at the time. I would say for sure the Amiga was best with iigs 2nd and st bringing up the rear. The iigs prob could of been a great game machine but it was not marketed as one so there wasn't enough game development. I never met anyone that owned one at home. The st had built in midi ports so people loved it for music but for anything else the Amiga was better. That said all 3 had some great software. Both the st and Amiga could emulate a Mac something the iigs couldn't although it looked like a color mac.

Amiga wins for games and video production.

The St was cheaper than the amiga but it was better for musicians.

The iigs wins for productivity and education software and was capatible with 8bit apple ii library.

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Important-Bed-48@reddit

One other thing I just remembered is while the Macintosh was the computer to do desktop publishing, in the early days the ST was a much cheaper alternative. As time went on both the ST and the Amiga could emulate a classic mac at the same speeds as the actual Mac. Infact the fastest classic Mac you could get was actually an accelerated Amiga. The other thing I forgot to say is when it comes to games none of these is the real winner, because over in Japan the Sharp x68000 wiped the floor with ocs/ecs Amiga's, STE's and basically any other 16 bit computer at that time. It was more expensive and not available anywhere but Japan still it's the most fun to play around with now in emulation.

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roirraWedorehT@reddit

I didn't have the Atari ST, but I had the IIGS and then the Amiga 500. The Amiga had a lot more going for it, in my opinion. I used the 500 (later upgraded to a newer revision motherboard) and then a 2000 that my brother gave me for most of the 1990s until one power fluctuation did something catastrophic to the 2000. Even used them on the internet. I don't think I would've enjoyed using the IIGS on the internet quite as much.

I do still have nostalgia for the IIGS, even though I preferred the Amiga.

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Fleischer444@reddit

That 2000 is worth a lot of money today.

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Xfgjwpkqmx@reddit

I wish I never traded in my perfect A2000 I had in the day for the A1200 I still have now, which are somewhat a dime a dozen.

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Fleischer444@reddit

A1200 is stating to be expensive to. I still have my 2000, 500, 600 and 1200. Really like the Amiga. 3000 looks the best. Buts that’s way to expensive.

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Remote-Pickle-8900@reddit

I haven't used those machines for decades except thru emulators. The Amiga is far superior. The IIGS was a good machine, don't get me wrong, but it was seriously hamstrung by the piteously slow 3Mhz CPU. The choice was almost criminal. As people have stated Apple engineers purposely hobbled the IIGS so it wouldn't compete with the upcoming Mac, but still made it fast (and cheap) enough to draw in existing Apple II customers -- it could literally run the existing software catalog directly on hardware.

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Infamous-Umpire-2923@reddit

Unfavourably.

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Jorpho@reddit

In the end, the only notable software I've heard of for the IIgs is a special port of Ultima that is apparently not as good as it sounds. And there's a port of Wolfenstein 3D, and the GS/OS itself is apparently interesting.

However the hardware happens to compare, the software library of the Amiga or ST is vastly larger.

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MoebiusX7@reddit

There was a port of Dungeon Master for the IIGS that was supposed to be decent.

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stromm@reddit

The IIgs was too close to a IIe and a Macintosh at the same time. I sold a few thousands to schools, a few hundred to “educators” and almost none to anyone else.

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CrystalSplice@reddit

The modern answer is that it can compare more favorably now than it did when it came out. As others have commented, Apple intentionally hampered the machine’s performance and capabilities for multiple reasons.

The AppleSqueezer fixes just about everything by giving you a new, much faster 65C816, combined with an FPGA, as much RAM as the system can handle, HDMI output, AND a RAM disk you can load images into. The only thing it doesn’t fix is sound, but there are some good new solutions for that from the community as well.

It’s theoretically possible the AppleSqueezer could have its FPGA core updated in the future to support sound routing through HDMI. There’s a microSD slot that’s planned for future expansion like storage.

For mass storage, I use a Reactive Micro CFFA3000, which works with the AppleSqueezer. It can emulate both floppy and hard disk images simultaneously and it has a software interface that can be accessed easily. It’s super easy to load up images from another computer, plug the CompactFlash card in, and go! No more floppies, and it’s fast!

You do of course run into software limitations…with the sound, for example, not all games are going to have stereo sound but if you can get a cleaner output that is worth it anyway - everything sounds better!

Software development for the 65C816 is still kicking, and I’d say the community is in a great place right now. The upgrades I have are NOT cheap, but…in my case at least the computer was and I even got the original Apple RGB CRT with it - both for only $100 off Facebook Marketplace.

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ABeardHelps@reddit

It's kind of an Apples to Oranges comparison. As an Apple II, the IIgs was an amazing machine. It was an evolution which provided more performance (16-bit 65C816), better graphics, better sound, built-in networking support (AppleTalk), etc. If you were coming from the Apple II ecosystem, it was a nice step up while still supporting all your existing software. This was something of a double edged sword as the IIgs was really pushing the limits of what could be done with the Apple II architecture compared to newer designs like the Macintosh.

The Amiga and Atari ST were more clean sheet designs that completely broke from their 8-bit predecessors (C64 & Atari 800) so they could better utilize the 68k platform and they were more comparable to the Macintosh (also 68000-based) rather than the IIgs. Fun fact, you could get a ROM add-on for the Atari ST that allowed you to run Macintosh software.

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InsaneGuyReggie@reddit

At my elementary school we had a computer lab with 31 IIes (including the one on the teacher’s desk) and a gs was sitting high atop a cabinet, acting as our disk server. That’s the only one I ever saw in real life. You would have had to get on a ladder to access the console

My jr. high school also had IIes but I never saw what machines were the disk server.

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ChatBot42@reddit

The IIgs is much more comparable to the Commodore C65 prototype. That in-between 8/16 bit back compat thing niched in a product lineup between the old aging machines and a new 68000 platform.

The IIgs struggled for the same reason the C65 would have if it had come to market. And, like the IIgs, would have spent most of its time running old software.

(BTW you saw this in the earlier Commodore 128 too. It didn't matter what a 128 could do because it spent most of its time in 64 mode.)

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FlyByPC@reddit

I'm only somewhat familiar with them (neighbor friend had an Amiga; school had Ataris and GSes), but I'd say for performance, Amiga >> the other two. For reliability, Amiga and Atari were far better than the GS. We had a computer lab of half IIe and half IIgs. On warm days, the GS machines would crash. I was TA in 4th period and sometimes had my 5th period English class in the computer lab. Some of the smarter students wondered why I was always using a IIe when I could have easily picked a IIgs. Didn't want to lose my work again.

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Ok_Programmer_4449@reddit

On processor capability and graphics it doesn't compare at all. It's primarily a souped up Apple II with 65816 processor. The 65816 was a 16-bit evolution of the 6502. It supported segmentation in a manner that was not quite as broken as the manner segmentation was handled in to 8086. It was still painful to program for. Its one saving grace what that it could operate in a 6502 emulation mode. Still the flaws that made it difficult to port many C programs to the 6502 (primarily stack and indexed addressing limitations) were apparent in the 65816.

It was slower than the 68000 (2.8 MHz, although 7+MHz accelerators were available), didn't have 32-bit extensions in the instruction set, and more limited memory (8MB max in the IIgs).

The one advantage it did have what it shared the open architecture of the Apple II series. It had slots. Because of that my IIgs has a SCSI interface, an 8088 (V20 actually) coprocessor card, and a Z80 card. So I have the ability to run MS-DOS and two ways to run CP/M programs on it. It's also signed by Woz. (No, it not a signature edition. It's signed by the actual person).

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Tsu_na_mi@reddit

It doesn't. It is closer to the Commodore 128 (C=64 with more memory) than the Amiga or ST.

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R-ten-K@reddit

The IIGS was inferior in almost every way (except for the expansion slots).

The CPU was significantly weaker. From there almost every performance metric was poorer than the Atari or Commodore machines.

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Timbit42@reddit

The Amiga 2000 had expansion slots. The IIgs had great sound, although mono.

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bingo1105@reddit

I had a friend with a IIGS and, coming from the 8-bit era, the IIGS graphics and sound were absolutely astonishing to me. The first time I saw the famous Deluxe Paint Tutankhamun image on his computer is burned into my brain.

Jealousy drove my determination to own an Amiga 500 and I think history has shown it was the superior machine. That said, the IIGS sound was gorgeous and the one thing that I still secretly envied as an Amiga owner. The opening of 'Zany Golf' on the IIGS has a special place in my heart.

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Unlikely-Place-1686@reddit

Steve Wozniak's return—temporarily—surely aimed for a modular computer like the //e, alongside the closed case or with specific options (SCSI). He wasn't wrong, but what followed already belonged to IBM clones. Jobs wasn't wrong either, but he would be ousted before returning to impose the iMac. It's starting to feel like a history lesson with all these years passing by. For those who weren't around, it was the era of the microcomputer pioneers…

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Kellerkind_Fritz@reddit

It's a very slow CPU with a dumb framebuffer for graphics, the sound chip is really the standout from the design.