Re: Prodos like dos33dmp?

["josephoswaldgg@hotmail.com" <josephoswaldgg@hotmail.com>]

I think you can eventually achieve the equivalent of dos33dmp. I am not
familiar with the IIc+, unfortunately, but my guess is that it is a
SmartPort device; a late enough version of prodos, even if it is
distributed on a 5.25 disk, will recognize a SmartPort device on boot
up.

So the good news is you could boot from a 5.25 disk and still be able
to use your 3.5" drive. Of course, you still don't have the 5.25 drive
:-)

However, there are several additional difficulties with ProDOS

1) dos33dmp is primarily useful because DOS has a built-in INIT
command, which can format a new DOS 3.3 floppy *and* make it bootable.
That includes, although I don't remember all the details, the ability
to write the boot sector & DOS loading code. ProDOS has a separate
utility program to format a disk, although I think you might be able to
format a SmartPort 3.5 drive from a short machine language (20 bytes or
so) stub. Still, I don't think the ProDOS boot block code and startup
code are resident in the memory image of ProDOS. You will also need the
utility program to transfer the PRODOS & BASIC.SYSTEM files onto the
disk to make it boot to BASIC.

2) The ProDOS device table needs to include the right entries to
properly support the IIc+ SmartPort driver in ROM. This is where an
emulator image may be slightly different; if the entry points on your
ROMS are even one byte moved from your emulated 3.5" drive support, it
will crash hard. You should be able to locate these entry points by
hand by examining the locations desecribed in the ProDOS 8 technical
reference manual, then edit the memory image by hand to make it fit
your machine.

But yes, I think the basic scenario would work

1) dump the ProDOS image (into the language card area, of course).
don't forget the QUIT code in the second bank
2) edit the device table to make it recognize your 3.5" drive

then you can BSAVE, BLOAD, and run programs to/from an already
initialized 3.5" ProDOS disk.

If you don't have a 3.5" disk, then you will need to get a binary dump
of the ProDOS utilities

one way would be

3) in an emulator, bload a utility .SYSTEM file, (the ,TSYS option is
your friend) create the text-file dump which will load them into memory
through the monitor. Transfer it over the serial port, then jump to
$2000 to run it. The key issue is that it has to be a single piece
.SYSTEM file, because you can't save multiple files until you have a
formatted disk. But I think the early ProDOS utilities are just one
file.

4) format a 3.5" floppy; doesn't matter if it has any files yet, just
an empty volume. You can't boot it, so you will have to go back and
repeat steps 1&2 after you are done in the utility to get back to the
BASIC prompt

5) once you have the 3.5" formatted then you can do step #3 for the
PRODOS and BASIC.SYSTEM. It doesn't really matter what address you use;
you can BLOAD them at $900 or so to create extra memory space below the
basic interpreter. Then, BSAVE them onto the formatted disk.

6) now, you have a bootable floppy. Next, you probably want to repeat
#3 for the utility program that has the formatter.

7) Now you have a bootable floppy with the ProDOS user utilities.
Finally, you should use step #3 to transfer over a real serial
file-transfer program, so you can stop using step #3.

8) use the serial file-transfer program to do file-by-file transfers
over a serial port from an emulator or whatever.

or 9) Develop a ADT-like image transfer program that works on ProDOS
block devices, to transfer 800k floppy images directly over the serial
port. I'm working (slowly) on such a program for the IIgs.

Sounds like fun, if that's the kind of brainteaser you like. There are
probably a few stumbing blocks you will run into; I don't recall all
the details of the ProDOS boot process, so bringing the memory image to
life may involve some weird tricks loading the I/O hooks in zero page
and so forth. You may have some frankenstein version of ProDOS along
the way that has unique bugs or difficulties.

Yeah, buying a 5.25 drive would be the easy way out. Not sure what you
mean about the damaged SCSI drive: most hard drives in my past were
sealed enough that you could only get at the SCSI cable (relatively
simple to repair/replace) and soldered-on devices. 

--Joe