Re: what OS should I use on an IIe hard disk

[Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>]

Robert Collet writes ...
> 
> First some background:
> 
>     The guy I worked for this summer used to teach electronics at a public
> school and was like their main computer guy. Consequently, he knows just
> about everything about the IIe. Anyways, we used to talk tech about the IIe,
> and he would every once in awhile talk about his apple II setup, which
> included, among other things, an 80 meg MFM hard disk and "enough memory  to
> run appleworks completly from ramdisk" However, at the time he was living in
> temporary residency and left the IIe back at home.         Well, yesterday I
> found out he was moving up perminently and offered to give me all of his IIe
> stuff, which he said comes to about 1000 pounds :).(when I get all of this
> stuff, which might be as soon as this monday, I'll post a summary of it)  Of
> course his setup will replace the IIe I use, and I plan to put all my games
> and whatnot on the hard disk. I know that I cant use  DOS 3.3 (which most of
> my games use) on a hard disk , so I guess I'll have to use prodos.

     One way or another, this seems best. You may be able to run a number of
your DOS 3.3 wares from hard disk in disk image form using DOS 3.3 Launcher.


>     I read the FAQs but I still have a few questions:
> 1. Whats the best  version of prodos for a IIe?

     For an enhanced //e with hard disk, you would probably want v2.0.3. This is
the current version of ProDOS 8. For sending 5.25" diskettes to friends, you
would want to use v1.9 because this is the last version which can run on 64k
Apple II's.



> 2. Generally, how compatible is prodos with dos 3.3 ,especially games.

     The commands as used in Applesoft BASIC programs are very similar, often
nearly identical. Small to medium Applesoft programs designed for DOS 3.3 will
frequently run under ProDOS with no changes.

     Commercial DOS 3.3 games (including copy-protected games which have been
deprotected) usually will not run correctly under ProDOS. Incompatibility may be
due to several factors: the game does CALLs to DOS 3.3's RWTS routine, the game
loads into parts of memory which are protected by ProDOS, the game uses parts of
Language Card memory needed by ProDOS, the game is too large to fit beneath
ProDOS in memory, ... . 



> 3. Can I run prodos programs from a GEOS environment? if not, is there any
> GEOS or GS/OS type GUI that I could use?

     There is a double-hires (B/W) desktop program for ProDOS 8. Supertimer is
always hyping GEOS; so, he may have some thoughts on how well it functions as a
program launcher (I don't know). Some users like the non-graphical ProSel
approach for managing access to lots of programs on a hard disk.


> I dont know if this is the right place to ask, but I do have a spare
> internal MFM hard disk that looks like it came out of a PC XT (except its
> half sized)
> I doubt the hard card for the IIe can be plugged directly into it, but are
> there any schematics on how to plug an internal MFM hard disk into the
> external plug?
 ....

     Don't know. If you have a Focus Hard Card drive, the easiest way to upgrade
size is to swap in a larger 2.5" IDE drive module.




Rubywand