Re: Some forward movement on Virtual Serial Host

[Kevin <kevin@hackaday.com>]

fellow user Riccardo was digging around asimov and found a program that allowed you to serve a pro dos disk image from your PC to your Apple II via serial port, but could not get it working.

I was (still sort of am) developing a SD card based disk image server that plugged directly into the disk II controller card had run across the project webpage (http://apple2.boldt.ca/?page=terserialdrive) where Terence noted it was an unfinished experiment for a specific model of GS

David Schmidt got wind of it, bolted on ADTpro's magic, and finished up a couple details and now you can serve a 140k to 32meg prodos image from your PC running ADTpro over a serial or Ethernet connection. That should work with any model of II and /// that works with ADTpro, though, since its a prodos driver, its not perfect and programs that overwrite the ram it sits in wont work with it (beagle compiler, and GEM pop to mind). Its still a million times better for people without any hard drives, or especially to us //c users who really had no hope for any mass storage.

Thats all awesome, but in my I have no space to theater a PC to an apple 100% of the time. Every time I want to use this, or ADTpro I have to unhook my apple II, drag it across the room, or house depending on which PC I want to use, hook everything back up, transfer stuff, or play with it a while, and THEN drag the whole mess back.

So what I am doing is making a little box that plugs directly into an Apple's serial port, and runs a ported version of ADTPro's Virtual Serial Drive server software. I am also in the deep end porting ADTpro's normal disk transfer to my little box, so in the end whenever I want to play with my apple, all I have to do is copy disk images to an SD card, walk that over and either use VSDRIVE to have a virtual hard disk, or transfer the image to a 5.25 floppy. (which sounds a hell of a lot better for me!)