Folk,

I have a copy of ProDOS-System.zip which unzips
to "Apple II System Disk 3.2.dc".

Can a Debian make a ProDOS boot diskette?
Should dd work?

Thanks, ... Peter E.

--
http://carnot.yi.org/
http://members.shaw.ca/peasthope/



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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 04/16/08 21:15, PETER EASTHOPE wrote:
> Folk,
>
> I have a copy of ProDOS-System.zip which unzips
> to "Apple II System Disk 3.2.dc".
>
> Can a Debian make a ProDOS boot diskette?
> Should dd work?

dd should be able to do it, if the hardware is capable. But I doubt
it, since "PC-style" floppy drives are soft-sector, and IIRC the
Apple drives were hard-sector.

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

We want... a Shrubbery!!
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LaetAi5ymFSZWh/Pal/rB6c=
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On Wednesday 16 April 2008, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 04/16/08 21:15, PETER EASTHOPE wrote:
> > Folk,
> >
> > I have a copy of ProDOS-System.zip which unzips
> > to "Apple II System Disk 3.2.dc".
> >
> > Can a Debian make a ProDOS boot diskette?
> > Should dd work?
>
> dd should be able to do it, if the hardware is capable. But I doubt
> it, since "PC-style" floppy drives are soft-sector, and IIRC the
> Apple drives were hard-sector.

I think Apple drives were soft sector, since I remember reading the info
in "Beneath Apple DOS" and "Beneath Apple ProDOS" about how the sectors
were defined and which bytes were used. Also some of the games, I
think, used games with the track and sector layout for copy protection.
I remember specifically having to hack and remove the copy protection
on at least one program and it involved editing the sector id codes.

The problem, though, is that Apple disks were not compatible with PC
drives and I think they had a different type of formatting that
the "regular"drives didn't deal with (other than hard/soft sector).

I do know there are Apple ][ and //e (and maybe //c) emulators that run
on Linux and if you have an image of the Apple ROMs, they'll run find
on Debian. (I wish I still had the images of the ROMs in my //e -- I
had a few cool extra features that made debugging and tracing much
easier.)

Hal
(Who still misses his Apple //e with a *fully socketed* motherboard, a
whopping 5 MB hard drive and who actually enjoyed programming in 6502
Assembler!)


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On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 01:04:14AM -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote:
[...]
> Hal
> (Who still misses his Apple //e with a *fully socketed* motherboard, a
> whopping 5 MB hard drive and who actually enjoyed programming in 6502
> Assembler!)

ooh, you're making me misty-eyed. That 6502 Assembler _was_ fun. And
the excitement when the upgrade card to 64MB arrived...

richard


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On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 07:54:19AM +0200, Richard Lyons wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 01:04:14AM -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote:
> [...]
> > Hal
> > (Who still misses his Apple //e with a *fully socketed* motherboard, a
> > whopping 5 MB hard drive and who actually enjoyed programming in 6502
> > Assembler!)
>
> ooh, you're making me misty-eyed. That 6502 Assembler _was_ fun. And
> the excitement when the upgrade card to 64MB arrived...

Oops, I mean KB of course.

richard


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Hal Vaughan wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 April 2008, Ron Johnson wrote:
>> On 04/16/08 21:15, PETER EASTHOPE wrote:
>>> Folk,
>>>
>>> I have a copy of ProDOS-System.zip which unzips
>>> to "Apple II System Disk 3.2.dc".
>>>
>>> Can a Debian make a ProDOS boot diskette?
>>> Should dd work?
>> dd should be able to do it, if the hardware is capable. But I doubt
>> it, since "PC-style" floppy drives are soft-sector, and IIRC the
>> Apple drives were hard-sector.
>
> I think Apple drives were soft sector,

Apple drives were indeed soft sector, originally, they had 13 sectors,
then they did a firmware update that increased them to 16 sector. (The
"firmware update" involved physically pulling and replacing a socketed
IC on one of the circuit boards inside the drive.)


There were hardware differences with the "Woz Mazchine" floppy design
and the IBM compatible design. An IBM 5 1/4 inch drive could be made to
read and write Apple disks with the aid of some extra hardware, it
involved using a (8-bit) card on the ISA bus and the use of a special
Y-cable that connected between that card, the floppy controller card,
and the floppy drive.


The same setup could also be used to defeat any floppy-based
copy-protection scheme. I owned one of these (still have it in a closet
somewhere) and used it to back up games. The Apple disk reading
capability came in handy, once.


Mark Allums


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On Thursday 17 April 2008, Richard Lyons wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 07:54:19AM +0200, Richard Lyons wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 01:04:14AM -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote:
> > [...]
> >
> > > Hal
> > > (Who still misses his Apple //e with a *fully socketed*
> > > motherboard, a whopping 5 MB hard drive and who actually enjoyed
> > > programming in 6502 Assembler!)
> >
> > ooh, you're making me misty-eyed. That 6502 Assembler _was_ fun.
> > And the excitement when the upgrade card to 64MB arrived...
>
> Oops, I mean KB of course.

I started with a //e with 64k on board because I just couldn't see why
anyone would need as much as 128k (I had just a standard 80 column
card). Then I got an Applied Engineering card that would give 3/4 of a
meg of memory later. At first I liked it, but found that AE had some
crappy policies -- they acted like a company built by the stereotypical
engineer with no social skills that didn't understand that customers
with cards that had issues with some //e boards would want to return
them. I switched over and got a 1MB card from another company (can't
remember which one) and it worked like a dream. I wrote a small shell
in ProDOS that I could run each morning when I started up that would
create a RAM drive on the card and copy all my files over to it while I
was reading the paper and swapping the discs as it asked for them.

Back then it was possible to know the firmware on the computer and all
the OS calls like the back of your hand. I miss that.

Hal


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