Re: The next step after writing my own Apple ][ wedge for the ///is...

[lyricalnanoha@dosius.ath.cx (Steve Nickolas)]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> So that suggests that there is some little dance to be done to
> get the hardware character gererator SRAM loaded.  Maybe it's as
> simple as hitting a softswitch...
> 
> Sounds like some reverse engineering of SOS.Driver is needed.

Definitely.  Right now Star relies on loading SOS.KERNEL and SOS.DRIVER so
that the tty font is set up and the data is loaded off disk, but it
basically slows the boot process down for no real reason.  Ideally I'd
figure out what they're doing, and create a modified DOS 3.3 bootloader
that, on a ///, will install the font and the two firmware images, etc.,
which the SOS.INTERP for Star does.  Obviously the Sara emulator knows how
this stuff is done, but as I recall it has no available source.  MESS
doesn't know it - it only loads the font successfully when the Emulation
Disk is booted.  Neither emulator seems to run even /// EZ Pieces correctly
either (something I'd *really* consider the first and foremost app to get
tested and running next to the ][ emulation mode xD, being that it is, in
effect, AppleWorks for the ///).

I think knowing more about the /// would not only be helpful to me, but to
the authors of the two existing emulators.  But it is a rather obscure
machine despite its infamy, so I'm not surprised there isn't much info out
there.

-uso.