Annc: Digisoft Innovations Announces Golden Grail Version 1.0

["bill.martens@gmail.com" <bill.martens@gmail.com>]

DigiSoft Innovations Releases Golden Grail 1.0

The latest Apple IIgs version of the popular Golden Orchard Series
CD's has been released.

12 December 2009 -- Tokyo Japan -- Digisoft Innovations is proud to
announce the immediate availability of the Golden Grail CD for the
Apple II gs and Apple IIgs Emulators.

Golden Grail 1.0 is the result of our effort to make a modern age
compilation of the best old Apple IIGS software.  Golden Grail
originates from the Golden Orchard project of the 1990's.  Golden
Grail finally brings Golden Orchard into the modern age by providing
the original contents of Golden Orchard in a series of hard drive
images that can be used by all modern Apple IIGS emulators.  This
project has been many years in the making, and much like the original
Golden Orchard, turned out to be more complicated and time consuming
than originally anticipated.

Let's face it, nowadays most people probably only run Apple IIGS
software in emulators, not in actual Apple IIGS systems.
Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to use the original Golden
Orchard with emulators, due to its complicated multiple HFS partition
structure.  What's really needed is a version of Golden Orchard split
into convenient 2MG disk images, and now, after many hours of
additional work, this is finally possible!

The original Golden Orchard partitions were HFS (except for a single
ProDOS boot partition) and larger than 32MB in size.  As such, when
converting them to ProDOS 2MG partitions, we needed to break up the
original partitions into a new structure.  The details of this new
structure are below.  We have written what original partitions map to
what new partitions in the list below.

There are two versions of the original Golden Orchard: one with 6 HFS
partitions, and a second version with one giant HFS partition.  The
differences are negligible besides the partition structure.  This work
is however based on the original Golden Orchard.

We recommend Eric Shephard's Sweet 16 Emulator (http://
www.sheppyware.net/software-mac/sweet16/index.html) for Mac users and
KEGS (http://kegs.sourceforge.net/) for everyone else for running
Apple IIGS programs in an emulated environment.  CFFA Users should be
able to copy the particions directly to the CFFA card using Andy
McFadden's Cidepress utility.

Golden Orchard Partitions -> Golden Grail Partitions
----------------------------------------------------
GO.ProDOS -> GO.ProDOS
GO-Main -> GO.AppleSofts, GO.Main, GO.Stacks
GO-Misc16Bit -> GO.Misc16Bit1, GO.Misc16Bit2
GO-Applications -> GO.Apps1, GO.Apps2, GO.Apps3
GO-Programming -> GO.Programming1, GO.Programming2, GO.Programming3
GO-G.S. -> GO.GS.Gfx1, GO.GS.GIF.JPEG, GO.GS.Music1, GO.GS.Music2,
GO.GS.MODs
GO-Disks -> Not converted as it is just a disk full of DiskImage
format 3.5" disk images.  Instead, we are providing the disk images.

Version History
---------------
Version 1.0 - January 11, 2009

Credits
-------
Golden Grail Production - Jim Maricondo and Bill Martens

Special thanks to Andy McFadden for CiderPress and Joe Wankerl for
Shrink II, without which this conversion work would never have been
possible.

Production Notes
----------------
The original Golden Orchard was converted into HFS disk images on a
Mac.
The files on each disk image were then copied individually to an HFS
volume staging area.

In the staging area, all filenames were converted to ProDOS limits.
Partitions were split up so that no one partition was larger than
32MB.
Shrink II was used to create a SHK image for each of the new split
partitions.

The SHK files were moved to a Windows PC and CiderPress was used to
convert each one to a PO (ProDOS Order) image file.

CiderPress was then used to convert the PO image files into 2MG image
files.

The 2MG files were then tested with KEGS.

Thank you for your support.

Download Information
--------------------
The package is freely available for download from the Digisoft
Innvations website as a 228MB zip compressed file which is platform
independent.

Website
http://digisoft.callapple.org