Re: Apple IIgs Virtual Hard Disk Project - Thoughts/Different Approach?

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

On Apr 29, 8:35 am, "sfahey" <sfa...@a2central.com.remove-dni-this>
wrote:
>   To: IUnknown
>   Re: Apple IIgs Virtual Hard Disk Project - Thoughts/Different Approach?
>   By: IUnknown to comp.sys.apple2 on Wed Apr 28 2010 06:28 pm
>
>  > If this is incredibly stupid or naive, please speak up and I will go
>  > back to my hole....
>
> No harm in bringing forth a concept. I don't think your proposal is that
> practical though. It would just be too slow to use on a regular basis.
>
> Apple II users are either going to pop for a mass storage drive, or suffer
> without one. There really isn't (yet) a tolerable technology somewhere in the
> middle.
>
> Sean Faheywww.a2central.com
> bbs.a2central.com

Nope, I don't think it's a dumb idea -- I was close to starting on the
same exact thing, but got sidetracked on other endeavors (or maybe
we're both dumb? ;-).  Game server has all the bootstrap logic you'll
need to send prodos.sys to $2000 and execute it.  What you have to do,
though, is replace the floppy block driver out with a serial block
driver.  For that you can probably gut/reuse the RWTS implementation
from AGS -- or at least gratuitously borrow code from it.  If there is
room, I suggest adding checksum logic back in, as it can avoid a crash
or two.  On the back-end side, implementing something to emulate a
block device is really trivial since it is all sequentially stored,
and the floppy logic is far more complex (interpreting sector
ordering, etc).

It might be worth investing some time to look into smartport, as it
operates at a higher speed and can benefit //gs and //c users alike.
(Anyone have smartport hardware specs?  I can't locate 'em)

Also, I'd like to apologize for the berlios/sourceforge confusion -- I
started at berlios and they had a string of uptime issues, so I jumped
ship over to sourceforge.  Unfortunately, so much as changed it merits
a total documentation rewrite, and I've not had the bandwidth to do
that.  There are so many things to go on about, the on-the-fly
packbits compression, the graphics conversion, the user interface
parts, the advanced search feature (press esc), and of course the Dos
3.3 RWTS emulation.  I secretly want to top that DHGR second life
thing.  But anyway, back to work! :o)

-Brendan