Re: ADT with a Laser 128

["Joshua Bell" <inexorabletash@hotmail.com>]

The usual story: after a recent revelation about backing up entire PC
screenshots using Virtual PC for posterity, I was motivated to dig out my
old Apple and save all of my old 5.25" disks for use with emulators before
the disks physically decay.

What I've got:
   - Hardware
      - Laser 128 EX (1-4MHz, 128KB)
      - WinXP box (~1.8GHz, 512MB)
      - Null modem cable, all the right adapters. For once.
   - Software - on the appropriate floppies
      - ProTerm 2.01
      - ShrinkIT 2.1
      - ProDOS system disk 1.8
      - A single DOS 3.3 disk (apparently I trashed most of my game disks...
sigh... oh well, there's Asimov)
      - Copy II Plus
      - Perhaps a few other odds-and-ends

I was able to create an ADT disk (hence replying to this thread). For others
who may search for this situation on Google, I noticed a couple of issues:

- To configure your serial port on the Laser, use Ctrl+P+Reset. Very slick
UI that I never knew existed when the Laser was my primary machine. I used
19200 8N1
- Hyperterminal sucks - we all know this - and I was never able to get it to
work bi-directionally. I took Calthaer's advice and tried Tera Term Pro.
This seems to be managing.

And the whopper:

- For some reason, the monitor (CALL-151 to * prompt, not video monitor) on
my Laser handles the following sequences differently than other Apples:

CALL -151
800: 1 2 3 4
: 5 6 7 8

This SHOULD put "01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08" into 0800 through 0807 - but it
doesn't. The second line vanishes into never-never land, so you end up with
"01 02 03 04 00 4C 00 5F" or other such garbage. This makes the ADT.DMP fail
even if you get it to transfer. It took a while to notice. I suspect this is
what caused an issue reported in 1997 in this posting:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=65ao1d%24iob%241%40hyperion.nitco.com&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain

The fix is to include the memory addresses for each line in ADT.DMP; I
whipped up a quick Perl script to add them and everything is happy.
Strangely, I can only find that one other report of such an issue. Is it a
known problem with the Laser's monitor routines?

Anyway, as Calthaer reports, the Laser 128's serial port is not compatible
enough with a SSC for ADT to do its trick. Damnit!

Okay - now that all of the above is reported to the newgroup for future
generations to Google on, and now that I've proved I'm actually trying
things out, here's my actual question:

===================

Assuming the above setup - a terminal program on the PC and Apple2 capable
of basic file transfers (e.g. Kermit, XModem, etc) - what is the most
efficient way to transfer disk images to the PC for use in an emulator?

ADT sounds ideal - stick in a floppy, hit send, and get a .DSK on the other
end. No attendance, no disk flipping. That requires a hardware purchase (a
true Super Serial Card) - do-able, but something can always go wrong, and I
have not heard of success using a Laser 128 + SSC + ADT - just a hypothesis.

The other obvious route is to ShrinkIT disk images (.SDK) on the Apple II,
then transfer them to the PC using the terminal programs. The down side of
this is the overhead of monitoring - for each transfer, there's the ShrinkIT
phase - which I'm assuming requires attendance and disk flipping if
compression isn't handy - followed by transferring the .SDK files to the PC,
followed by doing a .SDK to .PO conversion on the PC using NuLib.

Are there other routes? Is there another software package that will do
transfers on the fly? I'm lucky enough (relative to most people who want to
embark on this) to have terminal software on the Apple already.

===================

Thanks a bunch in advance!