Re: Is Davong (Hard Drives) still in business?

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

In article <Cw4L77.EH5@pts.mot.com>, Kevin Burtch <kburtch@pts.mot.com> wrote:
> 
> I have a Davong hard drive on a ][+, (soon on a ][e! :) and I was wondering
> about a few things...
> 
> First, does anyone out there have one?! I seem to have the only one made!
> 
> Second, (if yes to first :) does anyone have ProDOS drivers for it? Mine
> supports DOS 3.3, Pascal (UCSD P-system), and CP/M, but makes no mention
> of ProDOS. (maybe it was made before ProDOS)

I haven't heard of the drive, or any drivers for it.  What sort of
interface card does it use?  Does it have an EPROM on it?  If so, it
may be possible to modify the code in the EPROM to add a ProDOS block
driver.  I did this for the Nestar networking system back in high
school.  If the card already supports Pascal, it should be a simple
task to add a ProDOS driver.

There is a catch: how does its Pascal driver work?  Have you used the
drive from Pascal?  Does it require an installed device driver on the
Pascal disk (unlikely, since these were not common until after ProDOS
was released), or does it patch Pascal?
 
> Third, are there DOS 3.3 drivers for SCSI drives?

Not as such.  There are patched versions of DOS 3.3 that allow the use
of ProDOS block devices, particularly the programs which work on a
3.5" disk to provide two 400k DOS 3.3 volumes.  I think there is
another utility which provides multiple 140k DOS 3.3 volumes on a
ProDOS volume.  None of these are very good solutions, because DOS 3.3
is severely limited in the maximum disk capacity it supports (400k)
and many programs cannot cope with non-standard disk sizes.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand