Conference napalm::commusic_v1

Being a devout Amigan, I'm not the best person in the world to provide advice
in answer to your questions- but I will anyway...

One problem I'd see with your going for this deal is actually based on the
*success* of the Mac in the sequencer market. The trouble is, the products in
this market are becoming more and more expectant of a "loaded" machine, and I
would wonder whether you can get any current sequencers which can live within
the relatively small confines of a "first-generation" Mac. You might actually
have more of a selection for the C=128 machine, given that the developers for
it must live within its limits.

(Of course, my *real* advice is to get serious and buy an Amiga...)

Cheers,
	Bob

    Kevin, I sent you some mail on this.
    
    there's old MACs : MAC Plus, 1MB and up memory, 800Kb floppy drives
    there's older MACs: FAT MAC, 512K, 400Kb drives (with either the 64 or
                        128K RAM chips)(128K RAM systems can xpand to 3MB)
    there's REALLY old MACs: 128K, (2)64K RAMS, 400K floppy/ies.
    
    You will NOT find any MIDI software at all for a 128K MAC.  You MIGHT
    find an early version of current software that runs on a 512K system,
    but it must be available on 400K floppy.
    
    The problem is twofold; current program versions require almost a Meg
    to load,  plus, NO ONE ships software on 400K floppies.  As I noted 
    above, a 512K MAC with the 128K RAM can be upgraded to about 3Mbyte of 
    memory, big enough, but you've still got the 400K floppies to think about.  
    A 128K MAC has the old 64K RAMs, useless.
    
    hope this helps.  karl

re .0

see       <<< Note 2612.1 by TLE::ALIVE::ASHFORTH "The Lord is my light" >>>
                        -< Caveat from an outsider... >-


	....and its sort of endorsed by .2  i.e. a mac is a mac, is a 
mac forever, is only the mac it started out to be.

	Ya can't upgrade/update a mac, the only migration path is a
new mac (EXPEN$IVE !) 

	.....and RSN the only distribution medium will be CDs; the 
cheapest  "CD capabable mac"  will be 3x what you can afford (-:

	Reg


"Sorry, the CD player draws too much current for the II fx power 
supply, You'll have to trade up (again)."

    re .3 - 
    
    Reg, I'd still rather START with a sound-and-graphix (well, graphix)
    -capable machine than start with a bare-bones (shudder) PC.
    
    karl
    
    p.s. how well do full-featured PC music packages run on a 6MHz 8088 ?
    Oh, you say you can't upgrade those either ?
    
    p.p.s. I haven't heard ANYTHING about CDROM-*ONLY* software
    distribution on MACs.. methinks you're stretching to make a point.

    Not to get into any religious wars (dang, it's too late) but: it's
    extremely easy and cheap to upgrade the CPU for PCs. The motherboards
    are commodities, they come in all sizes, and they're compatible. These
    days, the price of the CPU is almost insignificant. I helped a friend
    pick out a 386SX system a couple months ago: for $1250 he got a system
    with SVGA (800x600, $400) and a 40-meg disk ($300) -- meaning that the
    CPU + the keyboard/minitower/powersupply/2-meg-memory cost only about
    $550. The cost of digital stuff is approaching negligible in the PC
    world.
    
    IMO - Hoyt

    re .4 - anyone wanting to start with a sound-and-graphics-capable
    machine would have bought an Amiga.
    
    ;^)
    
    len.
    

Getting back to the point...

Upgrade options  do  exist  for  some  of  the  older  macs.  Accelerators are
available  from  third-party manufacturers for the 512, Plus, and SE.  Some of
these are quite impressive - you can make your old Mac run faster than a IIci!
You can also upgrade an SE to an SE/30 via an upgrade from Apple.

Large screen  monitor  options  are  also available for these machines, but in
most cases you have to choose one (accelerator) or the other (large-screen).

Memory (up  to 4MB) is easy to upgrade on the Plus and SE.  I don't know about
the 512 and 128.

However, it  is  well worth it to check out the relative costs and flexibility
of  upgrading  a  cheap machine or buying one of the new machines - like a Mac
LC.   A  cheap  solution  may  be a good short-term solution; a more expensive
solution might be a better long-term solution.

Also, check out the macintosh conference on ROUTES::.

Jim

    DANGER ! DANGER !  Using certain MAC system accelerators MAY cause 
    the MIDI software to abort.  A friend of mine used an accelerator on an
    SE, gave stunning response running HELIX.  PERFORMER wouldn't run !
    
    karl

	According to this month's EM,,,  by adding Midi-manager to 
multi-finder a Mac can be upgraded to become a multi-tasking machine.
There's an overhead cost, somewhere between 20 and 50 %,  natch.
All this for only $30  - -  sucha DEAL !

	re acceleraters:

	The way I read the EM article Mac programs have to use
instruction loops to make time bases {no reasonable clocks available}
so any change in processor speed will muck things up  - -  unless
there's a case statement for processor type and speed, I've no idea if
there's a user program visible PSW sorta thing.  Dunno why they can't 
time off the video signals, its fast and there's only a small number 
of magic constants to handle.

	Reg