Re: Where can I get ProDOS 16?

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Wed, 03 Mar 1999 11:54:39 -0500, John Flynn <jflynn02@cs.iuf.edu>
wrote:

>I have an Apple IIgs with 5.25 floppies and lots of RAM. I haven't been
>able to locate a 3.5 drive yet, but am looking.
>
>I'm wondering, is there a file I can download and put on my
>ProDOS RAM disk that'll cause it to boot into ProDOS 16? Where can I get
>this file, if so? There's lots of small16 bit apps that I want to play
>with that'll fit into my RAM disk, but not onto a 5.25 floppy. I want to
>mess around with them, until I can find a 3.5" drive.
>
>Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

First off, the advice others have posted already is good so please
don't think I'm contradicting them.

I just took a look at System v1.1 that came with my IIgs.  If you put
the SYS.UTILS folder onto a bootable ProDOS 5.25" floppy, you get the
old 8 bit system utilities that you can use to format disks, copy
files and such.  This will take about 117k of disk space so it will
pretty much use up one entire floppy.

All the rest of the stuff on the System v1.1 disk that is required to
start ProDOS 16 takes 377k of disk space.  This can be reduce by
another 31k if you drop the ImageWriter, Printer and Modem drivers as
well.  So you would need a RAM disk that was at least 400k.  It would
have to be larger if you also wanted to put the program on the RAM
disk as well.  This means that if your IIgs only has 1 MB of memory,
more that half the memory will be in use by the time you boot into
ProDOS 16 which won't leave much room for a program and its data.

Don't forget that even though the program is in memory on your RAM
disk, it has to be loaded into memory again to actually run.

The stuff on these disks can be modified as well.  Not every program
needs every tool in the SYSTEM/TOOLS folder and not every program
needs fonts so you can play around with your system disk to make it
smaller or better support your programs.

Assuming we are using most of what is on the System v1.1 disk and
leave the ImageWriter, Printer and Modem drivers in, we can make 3
5.25" disks that contain the following:

     Disk1: PRODOS, BASIC.LAUNCHER, BASIC.SYSTEM, DIALOG.ICONS,
            ICONS folder, SYSTEM/DESK.ACCS folder, SYSTEM/DRIVERS
            folder, SYSTEM/FINDER, SYSTEM/LAUNCHER and SYSTEM/START
     Disk2: SYSTEM/FONTS folder, SYSTEM/SYSTEM.SETUP folder,
            SYSTEM/P16 and SYSTEM/P8
     Disk3: SYSTEM/TOOLS folder

Each of these disks contains around 130k of data each.  All you would
have to do once these disks were created is to boot the SYS.UTILS
disk, run the sytsem utilities, format your RAM disk for ProDOS then
copy all the files from these three disks to the RAM disk, change your
boot slot to the RAM disk and reboot.

This process could be automated by making a boot disk that started a
program that prompted the user to insert the disks when needed and
then rebooted the machine.

However, you could reduce the number of disks and the steps involved
in doing things manually by using ShrinkIt.  If you create a boot disk
that boots directly into ShrinkIt, you can put a small SHK file on
that same disk that contains some of the files above and then you
would have two more disks that would each contain an SHK file with the
rest of the files in them.

Either of these processes could be done on any version of ProDOS 16
and GS/OS up to System v4.0 as long as no single file (either
uncompressed or compressed with ShrinkIt) is larger than what a 5.25"
disk can hold.  System v5.0 introduced extended files which 8 bit
ShrinkIt cannot deal with but if you don't use ShrinkIt, you could
write your own copy program that would deal with extended files
correctly.  However, the higher the version of System software that
you use, the more 5.25" disks that it is going to take.

It would be impossible to do this with System v6.01 unless you wrote
your own version of ShrinkIt that could handle extended files
correctly as the Finder takes 183k of disk space when uncompressed but
it can be reduced to 127k with ShrinkIt.

Just something to think about.  :-)

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