Re: help running prodos on a // clone <please!>

[hamo@comnets.rwth-aachen.de (Harald Mommer)]

In article <altered-ya02408000R1201992257570001@news.imag.net>,
	altered@imag.net (Keven Fedirko) writes:
> Okay.  A buddy got this clone from his parents (un-used for 10
> years), and it "works", but he didn't have any db s/w for it,
> so over christmas I looked through my stash, and found
> my copy of appleworks.  "Great".  But this system doesn't
> seem to want to LOAD it off the disk, or even the 3.3 system
> disk I've made.  All the stuff worked fine on my //e, but not
> his system which seems to be a APCO 64k system, and Tiger
> on the back (not sure which is the brand and which the name).
> 
> It would load some of the other bootable disks (binarys with
> an interactive catalog, and full-disk applications).

Nice - this means, the hardware should be ok. But I can't tell you the
reason why DOS 3.3 doesn't work. DOS 3.3 does not do any hardware
check like ProDos does (see below).

> Is it even possible to run prodos on such an old machine, or was the
> //e + //c series the minimum configuration?  Or perhaps his
> system doesn't have a 80 column card or something.  Is there
> s/w versions of these things?  The prodos was only v1.0.1
> or some-such-thing circa 1984 and 1986.

The minimum configuration for ProDos is an Apple II+ with 64k RAM,
this means, you must have Applesoft in ROM and a language card
installed (or 64k RAM already on the board). There is no need for a 80
column card to boot ProDos 1.0.1. But ProDos v1.0.1 does a check if
the computer is really an Apple II or a clone. If it's a clone, it
denies to work, but there is a patch for ProDos. One of the checks the
loader does is to look if the startup-message of the machine is "Apple
][".  On my clone, it was simple "COMPUTER", and until I patched the
operation system, it didn't work.

> The other snag might be there is no "apple" keys, but
> perhaps a patch could be found to enable an alternate keypress...

The Apple keys are logically nothing else than the joystick buttons, 
so this should not be the problem.

Harald
-- 
Harald Mommer		  | mailto:hamo@comnets.rwth-aachen.de
Communication Networks	  | Aachen University of Technology
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