Re: Hardware musings

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

David Wilson wrote:

> The Workstation card for the Apple IIe also looks like a Pascal 1.1
> device so that it can be used as a printer card (I think to either to a
> local printer or possibly to a network printer).

That's correct - after the chooser has been initialised it appears as a
Super Serial Card from an ID perspective.

At initialisation, it ID's as a ProDOS Block Device, which enables
network boot. You can force it to network boot by holding down OA
during a PR#x

> > Since the
> > //c already has a smartport, why couldn't a device be built that connected
> > to the smartport and talk to an AppleTalk network (via localtalk or even
> > ethernet.)
>
> Existing software for the IIe and IIgs does not know about a Smartport
> connected AppleTalk interface - much better to make it look and act
> like a Workstation card.

Unfortunately doing so requires implementing (almost) the entire ProDOS
MLI interface for your remote filesystem. Obviously you can't implement
the block level calls though - even the Workstation card doesn't do
that, rendering a lot of the 'clever' file utility software useless for
Appletalk volumes.

Other problems include sparse files, which are unsupported on pretty
much everything except Apple II filesystems (this too was a problem in
the Workstation cards day, not so much now).

The OP seems to suggest simulating SmartPort over a network interface,
which is feasible, keeping in mind that no existing network filesystems
operate at the device level, with the exception of some perculiar UNIX
setups, so you'd need to implement the server side yourself.

This would be vastly simpler that reimplementing the ProDOS MLI and
translating it to some other system. In fact, you could probably quite
easily implement readblock/writeblock in a couple of kilobytes and
stuff it in AUX memory where third party RAM drivers live, keeping in
mind you'd need to patch the driver into ProDOS manually.

Matt