Re: Apple //e HardDrive

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <390DE253.1B8E5B2B@dcnet2000.com>,
Phoenyx  <quazar@dcnet2000.com> wrote:
 
> Paul Schlyter wrote:
> 
>> Does this mean you always have to boot on the same device, unless
>> you swap some cards around?
> 
> On the GS, no. Just change the ROM settings or better yet, get ProBoot.
> ProBoot will let you temporarily boot another device either at startup
> or through the GSOS Extras menus. It even allows for adjusting system
> speed.
> 
>> I did some work on such a Corvus system once: it was expensive, big
>> and noisy!  Those 5 MBytes on the Corvus was partitioned into 35
>> different "areas" of 140K each, where each "area" could hold one
>> Apple DOS volume.  The volume was selected by supplying the
>> appropriate volume number - thus doing:
>> 
>>    CATALOG,S5,D1,V2
>>    CATALOG,S5,D1,V13
>> 
> <snip>
> 
> Sounds like you have a lot of Dos experience.
 
Well, I mulled through disassemblies of the whole thing many years
ago.  That experience is, just like DOS itself, now quite dated
though.  I ceased dabbling with DOS around 1984.
 
> Early on, I fooled with it but Prodos was the standard on my 2c. I just
> ignored directories unless I had a lot of files to place on the disk.
> 
>> Yes, for bigger disks.  I played around with ProDOS a little, but
>> never used it that much.  First I didn't see the need for
>> subdirectories on a 140K or even a 640K floppy.  Second, ProDOS meant
>> that you lost Integer Basic, which perhaps wasn't such a big deal
>> except that I had replaced Integer Basic with the S-C Assembler, and
>> the loss of that assembler in the Language Card I perceived as a
>> bigger deal.
> 
> Because of the root directory file limit, I can see the need for
> directories on a 640k disk if the system treated it like one disk.
 
1. A DOS disk cannot be 640K large.  Due to limits imposed by the VTOC,
a DOS disk volume can be max 500K (assuming 256-byte sectors).
 
2. There is no fixed limit of the root directory imposed by DOS.  You
just chain as many ectors as you like to the root directory.  You
could even make the whole disk a root directory if you wanted: it
wouldn't be sensible to do that of course, but it would be possible.
On my 320K DOS volumes I let the root directory occupy 31 sectors
instead of the usual 15 sectors.  Yes, the file list sometimes got
rather long, but I never ran out of directory space on those disks
(31 sectors with 7 directory entires each ==> the average file size
could be as small as 1.5 KBytes, or 6 sectors, on a 320K
disk volume.  A standard 140K disk volume had 15 sectors of
directory ==> average file size could be as small as 1.3 KBytes
without running out of directory space).
 
> Unfortunately, Prodos is just as difficult to add a disk driver to
> that can be used in an universal fashion. At best, you would have
> to replace the /RAM driver and use some aux memory. If the driver
> only had to run in Basic.system you would not have these limitations.
> 
> I do agree about the ease of swapping languages in DOS. I think that's
> one of my favorite things about the Apple II, it's adaptability.
 
Here we fully agree !!!!
 
-- 
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