Re: USCD Pascal on a CFFA drive

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

AppleCPM <a2@wilserv.com> wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> On Apr 4, 11:10 am, Wulf wrote:
> <--- snip --->
> > Last thing:
> > This is just a work around.
> > My goal is
> > a) to use the full CF capacity (in my case 32MB)
> > b) find a solution for the 77 file limitation (maybe a couple of
> > volumes as described by user Steve in a older post)
> 
>     The way to get the maximum Apple Pascal file count in a ProDOS 32
> MB partition is to use the ProFile Partition Manager.  PPM will allow
> you to set up 32 Apple Pascal volumes.  That would allow 77 files in
> each of the 32 volumes giving you a limit of 2464 files.  However, it
> is not known if PPM will work with CFFA given that CFFA volumes have
> no partition map.

The partition map shouldn't be an issue. Pascal ProFILE Manager was
written for the 5 MB ProFILE hard drive, which has no partition map.
(Someone subsequently modified it to work with other hard drives.)

PPM works by creating an artificial "partition" inside a ProDOS volume,
by reserving a block of space at the end of the volume, creating a file
called PASCAL.AREA in the ProDOS directory (with storage type 4, which
ProDOS recognises but doesn't know how to interpret the contents), and
marks all its blocks used in the volume bit map.

The internal structure of the Pascal area is then handled by running PPM
while in Pascal.

At least with the ProFILE, you couldn't have a volume managed by PPM
which you could also boot from, since PPM works on a ProDOS volume and
Pascal has to boot from a Pascal volume.

With a partitioned hard drive or CFFA, you may be able to set up the
first partition as a small bootable Pascal volume and the second as a
ProDOS volume containing an area managed by PPM, but this depends on how
the modified PPM locates its target volume - if it expects it to be on
drive 1 on a particular slot, then this won't work, and you would have
to boot from a separate device.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz