More "Myraglen" mischief

[mcafee@umich.edu]

Thanks to everyone who offered advice on my "Tower of Myraglen" problem.  The
solution to that problem, however, seemed to introduce several other problems.

First, as suggested, I copied a new version of ProDOS to the copy I made of
the ToM boot disk.  That seemed to work at first--the Loader screen came up--
but then I got the message "You Must Boot From The Master!"  (This is the same
message I got whenever I tried running the Tower.Sys16 file directly from
the Finder.)  Well, I wasn't sure what to make of that, except that possibly
there was some kind of hidden file on the Myraglen boot disk that Tower.Sys16
looks for to make sure it's not being booted from a copy.

So, I tried putting a new copy of ProDOS on the master boot disk.  I couldn't
delete the old one, since the disk is damaged somehow, but I was able to
rename it.  I then copied the file P8 from System 6.0.1 to the master,
and renamed it ProDOS.  When I booted the master then, I didn't get the
Loader screen; instead I got a generic application launcher.  My System P8
file doesn't seem to be smart enough to automatically launch Tower.Sys16
from the root directory upon booting.

Finally, I compared the old, renamed ProDOS file that had originally been on
the boot disk with the new copy.  Their lengths were 21K and 14K, respectively.
Oho!  I might be using some incompatible version of ProDOS.  I got one of
my old game disks from about the same time that Myraglen was released.  It
had a ProDOS file in the root directory of length 20K.  Close, but no cigar,
but I decided to try it anyway.  Now this is the weird part.  When I copied
that old ProDOS file to one of my hard disk partitions, its length dropped
from 20K to 14K.  I set both the "copy from" and "copy to" windows to "View
By Size", and watched the file size shrink upon copying.  This was quite
unsettling, as it violates my intuitive understanding of how an operating
system should, well, operate.

Subsequent fiddling with ProDOS files from different game disks--all of which
shrank to 14K upon being copied to my hard disk--resulting in my being
dumped into the Monitor upon booting the Myraglen master disk (at location
E1/D40C, if it makes a difference.)

Can anyone make any sense of this insanity?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sean McAfee       |  "Now THIS is progress! A third eye to probe the subtle
mcafee@umich.edu  |   nuances of reality! How does it look?"  -- Dr. Zygote
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