Re: DOS 3.3 Nibble Encoding

[rdippold@qualcomm.com (Ron "Asbestos" Dippold)]

Just to talk a bit more about track 0 secotr 0... I wrote a boot
selector which was located on the first few sectors of track 0.  When
you booted a disk, a menu of binary files on the disk (graphical, with
stars flying all over the place) would appear within a second
(literally) of the chunka-chunka-chunka.  You could then choose the
file and it would load it and place some variables in memory that it
would expect to be there if DOS had actually been loaded.  Very nice.

Anyhow, as a variation of this, I made one disk that had several Track
0 sector 0s on it... each one was slightly different and would load a
slightly different version of DOS 3.3 - Each version had a separate
catalog, so that was the only thing that needed to be changed, you
didn't need a complete DOS 3.3 for each version.  So whenever you
booted the disk, whichever "Sector 0" was found first would load its
own DOS and you'd randomly be in one of three "different" disks.

Totally useless, but fun to give people copies of.
-- 
Texas: Where 'cowpoke' is a verb.