Re: [Q]How to use CFFA?

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

heliboy2003@yahoo.com.tw wrote:

> I've received my CFFA card couple of months ago but didn't have time
> to play with until this week. After reading the user manual, I am very
> confused. The manual says that the CF card needs to be formatted, but
> how? It says that I need to use Copy ][+ or Apple System Utilities to
> format the CF card, but how can I run the Copy ][+? (I have an Apple ]
> [e without any Floppy drive). Does that mean I have to get a working
> Floppy Drive and found a Copy ][+ diskette to format the CF on my
> Apple ][ then I can use CFFA?

The CFFA assumes that you have a working Apple II, with the ability
to run ProDOS and its utilities.  You don't strictly *need* Copy II
Plus, since the ProDOS Utilities can format disks and copy files, but
programs like Copy II Plus or ProSel's Cat Doctor make these tasks
more convenient.

An alternative to getting a floppy drive would be to get someone to send
you a formatted CF card with ProDOS and utilities already installed, or
an image of such a card that you could transfer to a CF card (with
CiderPress, for example).

Once you have a boot partition working, you can use the programs on
that partition to format and populate the other CFFA partitions.

But even if you take that route, you will almost certainly wish that
you had a floppy drive and controller, since that was for decades the
primary path for getting programs and data into and out of an Apple II
and many older Apple II programs will expect to use a floppy.

> Another question, I have totally no idea on how Apple Dos or ProDos
> works, if I have the CF card formatted OK, can I put the Disk ROM
> images (.dsk, .po or .nib) found on the web to the CF card and run it?
> Thanks.

The CFFA is natively a large capacity block device, which means that
DOS doesn't know what to do with it.  There are workarounds available,
like DOSMaster, but ProDOS is a much more comfortable solution unless
you are just running game images.

Under ProDOS, you create subdirectories and copy program and data files
to the CFFA and, typically, use a program selector program to create a
menu from which to choose programs to run.  ProSel is a great 8-bit
program selector that comes with a large set of very competent and
useful utility programs.

-michael

NadaNet file server for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."