kawakami@ocf.berkeley.edu (John Kawakami) (06/27/91)
I recently posted a short message asking if $300 is too much for a GCR.
It seems that it is actually not much to charge. However, I have to
apologize to everyone who offered to buy it, as I am still just thinking
about selling it. If I decide to sell it, I will hold an auction later
in the summer.
*************************************************************************
Things to think about re the Spectre GCR.
* Mac ROMS are very expensive now. $250+ now. This means fewer sales
for the Spectre which means that GBS must focus on other products to
produce revenue.
* System 7.0 does not work on Spectre now. It probably will eventually,
knowing the way Dave Small works his magic. But the new System will
probably not be as compatible as 6.0.3 is for a while.
* On the plus side, a Spectre on a TT or SST030 is a cheap alternative
to a Mac II.
* If you have a full blown mono ST system with a memory upgrade and a
hard drive with free space, this is a cheap way to become a Mac. If
you need to get a hard drive or a ram upgrade kit, the price of "going
mac" gets expensive fast (GCR needs 1 meg and a floppy, but 2 megs and
ten megs of hard disk are closer to a usable minimum configuration.)
The Mac Classic under the educational discount is under $1000 (I'm not
sure how much) and it has full compatiblilty as well as giving you
another CPU to hack on (sometimes it's very handy to have two machines).
* There is no SuperDrive for the GCR. On the other hand, all disk accesses
are faster than most macs' disk accesses.
# The GCR is usually very good to me. It rarely ever crashes (under System
6.0.5) and has let me run Microsoft Word 4.0, which seems to be a popular
standard around campus. I also did some programming work on it. It
is a useful tool. However, it is not as disk compatible as Dave Small
would have you believe: it failed on the two drives I was using. One was
a late model TEAC, the other was an NEC (which is popular with 3rd party
disk makers for some reason). The TEAC never worked right, the NEC was
hacked/fixed with instructions by Small. It is supposed to do Mac disks
correctly with other 3rd party disk drives.
************************************************************************
John Kawakami kawakami@ocf.berkeley.edu
ucbvax!ocf.berkeley.edu!kawakamisytang@lamar.ColoState.EDU (Shoou-yu tang) (06/27/91)
Although Mac plus ROM is not as easy to find as last year, If one post a wanted message in comp.sys.mac.wanted still possible to find a set for about $100 to $150.(There is a set going now for bid >$90 in there) The only thing is get the ROM first then buy the Spectre. As system 7 goes, even a lot of Mac add on accerlator has trouble with it, one of the Mac developer that I know has a SE with 030 board crash with system 7. plus without 030 or PMMU, there is not much advantage to jump except probably the true type font. And to run true type font does not require system 7, the 6.0.7 can handle true type font,only need to get the true type font init from the ftp.apple.com located in a file call personal-laserwriter-tool.sit ( the actural name might be silcely off, it's the new laser writer Apple introduced eariler) and get the true type fonts from the same place in the other file call true-type-font****.sit.hqx Under GCR, you don't need the superdrive to import PC(or STE)files. Run the apple file exchange from the Mac mode then insert the PC disk. The directory of the PC disk will show up in the file exchange dialog box and ready for you to transfer to Mac or vise versa.( Better then Mac SE). Tang sytang@lamar.colostate.edu