Re: Apple II OS help

[brainy <brainy@mc.net>]

Rafael Alves wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know where could I download documentation about the Apple II OS?
> I have had one of these beauties in the 80's and now I am using an emu
> (AppleWin) to replay all those games (just for fun) but I don't know
> anything about the OS (I don't even remember its name!).
> 
> Thanks
> 
> rafael@writeme.com
There are several OSs for the Apple II. All of these were made/endorsed
by Apple. I can't help you on detailed documentation, but I can post a
short summary of the most useful (non-programmer's) commands.

First there was DOS 3.X (x < 3). It is obsolete, and replaced by DOS
3.3. There is the Pascal OS, and the ProDOS 8 OS. From BASIC, the DOS
3.3 commands and the ProDOS commands are very similar.

The IIGS has ProDOS 16, which was replaced by GS/OS.

There are a number of third party custom versions of DOS 3.3. Many
companies used custom OSs for copy protection. SSI, for instance uses
R-DOS.

O.K. DOS 3.3 summary:

The equivilant of the DIR command is CATALOG. You can RUN any program
that has an A or an I in its' type. You can BRUN some of the files with
type B, but the file is frequently not ment to be executed directly.
Don't worry about the T type

RUN BASIC programs. Type A is AppleSoft, and type I is Integer BASIC.
AppleSoft has a ] prompt, while Integer's is an >. An asteric (*) is the
system monitor, typically what you get dropped into when the machine
crashes.

BRUN binary programs. As I alluded to above, often these aren't ment to
be BRUNed.

DELETE unwanted files. Equivilant of DEL or ERASE.

ProDOS Summary:
Instead of using CATALOG, use CAT. CATALOG works, but it doesn't look
nice unless you are in 80 coloumns (activated by a PR#3).

DELETE works the same.

Use the smart run command -(a hyphen) to execute files of type BAS or
SYS. If you're using a IIGS emulator and GS/OS 6 is loaded you can also
use the dash to execute S16 files.

BYE gets you out of BASIC.SYSTEM, and to whatever BYE routine is loaded
(Depeneds on the version of ProDOS, and there is a custom version called
Bird's Better BYE).
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