Re: 20 Years Later: What storage options for IIgs?

[altan@aol.com]

On Dec 16, 11:55 am, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> al...@aol.com wrote:
> > What sort of mass
> > storage options exist?
>
> Most would suggest a CF card solution such as CFFA.  Even die-hards like
> myself are mothballing their (rapidly aging) SCSI drives.
>
> > - I see some Ethernet products exist, but is there any way to NFS-like
> > mount disks?
>
> Not directly over ethernet.  However if you have a Linux box (or Mac OSX)
> available, you can setup an appletalk server and directly mount volumes from
> there. Bridging localtalk <--> ethernet can be done using a Cayman Gatorbox
> (plentiful on eBay) or even an older Mac running bridge software.
>
> AFAIK, no one has tried writing a //gs appletalk driver that goes out over
> ethernet.  Since most of the logic lives in the system ROM, this might not be
> very simple to do.
>
> It might be easier to write an NFS client than to do appletalk over, e.g. an
> Uthernet adapter.  The high-level API to NFS is vaguely similar to ProDOS, in
> that it uses basic open-by-name, access relative block, read, write, etc.
> primitives.  The hard work would be in supporting resource forks.
>
> Classic NFS operates over UDP, which is certainly easier to implement than
> TCP.  Still, you have to manage packet re-ordering, fragmentation and all the
> other "usual suspects".
>
> Steve

Thanks Steve.  Sounds like a CFFA solution works well.  Is there one
you recommend?

What kind of software can you put on the CFFA?  Only ProDOS stuff?
Can you put Apple IIgs software that isn't protected (either naturally
unprotected or cracked)?

Also, regarding the CFFA, can you get it to act like a ton of 800K
drives rather than 4 32MB volumes?  Acting like a ton of 800K drives
(even if you could only pick two at a time) would (I expect) would
provide more compatibility.

Thanks

... Altan
www.aaarpinball.com