Re: Trying to cram GS/OS into a walnut

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

jonINTERNETrelayCHAT@napaVALLEYnet.CLARInet (Jon Bettencourt) wrote:

>If I were to make a ROM disk for the IIgs, how would I do it? Can it be as
>big as 6.5MB? In what format should I save it in? Would it be the same as
>an HDV file? I'm feeling like putting the complete GS/OS, plus a few extra
>things, on there and booting off it.

There are two types of ROM disks.  Apple IIGS ROM disks and
Apple II ROM disks.  Apple IIGS ROM disks are addressed
through the memory expansion slot.  The ROM disk can be up
to a little less than 8MB in size (8MB minus the amount of
ROM on the IIGS).  I don't think there were any genuine ROM
disks, but the RamKeeper fooled the IIGS into thinking on of
its RAM cards was ROM.  The RamKeeper used a power
supply and a battery to make this work.

In contrast, Apple II ROM disks fit into one of the seven Apple
Bus slots of the Apple IIGS.  They also work on the IIe.  Such
cards can theoretically be any size, but I do not think they
exceeded 1MB for genuine ROM disk cards.  For the powered
RAM cards pretending to be RAM cards, I believe the
RamFactor with RamCharger did this.  Max size was 5MB
(RamFactor plus piggyback expansion card) I think.

The IIGS ROM disk is much faster than the Apple II ROM
disk.

>If I wanted to make an 800K disk with just enough files to successfully
>boot up GS/OS and access files on AppleTalk, what files would I need? It
>would need to fit on an 800K disk (with a few bytes taken away by the
>Mac's Desktop file). After I accessed the disks on AppleTalk, could I
>reboot from them?

Not sure.  It would be a tight fit at best.  Did you get the disks
I sent you?  The System 5.0.4 disk with HFS FST installed
would let you read and write Mac 800k disks easily.