Re: A silly idea for a card for an IIgs

[Spacehopper <nospam@me.com>]

"Jayson Smith" wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Okay, so maybe I'm way off here. And before I start, let me say that I 
> couldn't even begin to design this card. Here goes.
> 
> A card that installs into slot 7 on an IIgs, thus being the first slot being 
> checked for a disk controller if boot is set to Scan. When the system is
> 
> first turned on, it shows up as a bootable device. When booted, a 'fake'
> bootloader program is loaded and run. This program communicates with the
> 
> card to do its thing. The card, meanwhile, is connecting to a WiFi or 
> Ethernet network and using NTP to obtain the current time. Once this is 
> done, the correct time, as well as an image of battery ram also stored on 
> the card, are communicated to the program running on the GS. That program 
> then sets the GS clock and restores the GS batram from the image received 
> from the card. The point being, if you have a dead batram battery, rather 
> than getting it replaced, just use this card. As a bonus, every time you 
> turn your GS on, the clock gets set accurately. Once the restoration and 
> clock setting is complete, the program in memory invalidates the reset 
> vector and jumps to $FA62 to do a reset. This causes the batram settings to 
> take effect, and also causes a reboot, at which point the card, having 
> already done its thing, behaves differently. 
> Once the card in slot 7 has done its thing once after powerup, the boot 
> program it loads changes. It becomes a program to keep scanning just like 
> the GS does, thus effectively nullifying the fact that it's even there. 
> Another alternative would be to have the card stop looking like a disk 
> controller once it's done its thing, but if we keep the disk controller 
> disguise, we could do nifty things like have it create a ProDOS volume where 
> a batram image and a config file indicating timezone, wifi settings if used, 
> etc. are stored. You could even use something like Batrammer to save your 
> desired batram image to this card.
> 
> Okay, so I'm probably missing out on some childish reasons this idea 
> wouldn't work. But I thought I'd just throw it out there.
> Jayson

I originally replied to this saying that it was easier to achieve this in an
NDA than to build a new card to do the job. There is of course ShiftyList from
SheppyWare that will do some of what you suggest:

http://www.sheppyware.net/apple-ii-software/shifty-list.html

However, I took this is a challenge, so have built the RamRunTime NDA, which
will check the BRAM settings at boot, and if they are not the same as the
saved preferences, will restore them with a double boot. The system clock
will then optionally be set if you have Marinetti installed, and finally you
can choose an application to launch automatically at boot time.

Grab it, along with my other software, from my website:

http://www.wannop.info/speccie/

Cheers - Ewen Wannop (Speccie)