After many years of faithful service (18 years to be exact), my beloved IIe is beginning to die on me (the monitor jack is starting to break off from the board and causes the monitor to go out if bumped), so I decided to 'upgrade' to that shiny new IIgs I always wanted. I found a wonderful setup on ebay which includes:
Apple IIGS ROM 3 CPU with 1MB on system board with another 4MB Expansion Card in Memory Expansion Slot Apple High Speed SCSI Card is installed in Slot 7
Apple Color RGB Monitor for the Apple IIGS
2 - 3 1/2 Disk Drives
1 - 5 1/4 Floppy Drive
Apple IIGS ADB Keyboard and Mouse
Kensington System Saver IIGS
100MB Microtech External Hard Drive (formatted for the IIGS with System 6.0.1 installed)
CD - Rom Drive
Everything is great except for the fact that it's ROM 03. The problem with ROM 03 is that some of the best IIgs games won't play on it (most notably Shufflepuck and Captain Blood). However I just happen to have a spare IIgs sitting here that is ROM 01. I believe I could easily take all the cards from the 03 IIgs and stick them in the 01 IIgs.
My question is what does ROM 03 offer over ROM 01? I know it has more RAM/ROM, but if that's the main difference then I'm perfectly happy to give it up (I'm not going to be running any major programs on my IIgs anyway). I heard that there were some bug fixes and some improvements to the graphics/sound, can anyone elaborate on this?
Is it worth keeping ROM 03? Will the above configuration even work on 01?
I'm not sure why the newer ROM release would not
play your games. These were upgrades and should
be backwards compatible. Have you tried your
games on a ROM 1 machine? Did it work?
There are some IIgs games that only work on Rom1 due to the fact they use some undocumented entry points that got changed in the new rom. Many of my IIe games don't appear to be working either, but that is most likely due to the fact they're pirate copies and are doing something OS specific to bypass copy protection. Although Moon Patrol and Gremlins (both legit) refused to work...