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Re: Apple /// software
Mitchell Spector wrote:
dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson) wrote:
On 2008-01-24 00:57:45 -0700, rob <rob@nospam.net> said:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/unsorted/
.
Business Basic
Apple /// Confidence Tester
Apple /// Diagnostics
Three EZ Pieces Disk 1
Three EZ Pieces Disk 2
SOS 1.1 System Utilities
SOS 1.3 System Utilities
Apple /// System Demo
SOS System Utilities Data
Apple ][ Emulation Disk
Pulled out my (rather small) collection of Apple III 5.25 disks and
found I have a few other titles on hand, not in the above list:
- PFS
- QuickFile
- Apple /// Pascal
- /// Backup
- Disk Edit
- Draw-on-Three
- Acess III
- Profile Hardisk Utilties
- Apple Presents...Apple: An Introduction to the Apple III Plus
- Apple III CP/M Master and WordStar (Z80 co-processor required)
- Various additional SOS drivers
- Viscalc samples disk
What I'd really like to find is a COMPLETE list of all the software
released for the Apple III. I can't imagine there were more than a
few dozens titles released. All these years later I'm still curious if
anyone wrote any music/sound software (it did have a 5-bit DAC)
or III-specific games or any kind.
Given Apple's fanatic desire to build the ///'s "businesslike" image,
I'm not surprised that recreational and educational software was
discouraged.
Compared to the Apple II, the Apple /// was a locked-up closed system.
You had to run a gauntlet to become a /// developer, and information
needed to design software and add-on hardware was hard to come by.
If you compare an Apple /// running SOS with an Apple ][ running ProDOS,
they differ in areas such as the structure of the system software on
disk, entry points in the operating system and firmware, memory layout,
interface to the hardware and screen memory, etc. A SOS application
cannot run on an Apple ][ (or on ProDOS), and a ProDOS application
cannot run on an Apple /// in SOS (but might work on an Apple /// in
Apple ][ emulation mode, if you were running ProDOS 1.0.)
It's worth mention the Titan "///+//" and "///+//e" plug-in cards
that allowed the Apple III to fully emulate an Apple II Plus or IIe (without
the artificial limitations normally imposed by the Apple III's hardware).
With a 65C02 plugged in, theorically you could run ProDOS-8 v2.0.3.
Of course these cards are far less common than even the Apple III itself.
Did these cards actually use much of the /// hardware (except I/O),
or were they really just Apple II's on a card?
GS/OS on the IIgs has many significant improvements over ProDOS-8, which
leapfrog the capabilities of SOS, but the structure of the operating
system and hardware are completely different.
On an interesting note, GS/OS did directly borrow some components or
at least concepts from SOS.
And not just from ProDOS? What kinds of concepts unique to SOS made it
into GS/OS?
There is no point running /// EZ Pieces on an Apple ][, as AppleWorks
1.0 is very similar (as far as I am aware - I haven't seen /// EZ Pieces
since about 1984, and have barely ever used an Apple ///).
My understanding is ///-EZ-Pieces _IS_ AppleWorks. The menus,
the layout, the keyboard commands are virtually identical from what I
remember. In fact, you can directly load up AppleWorks data files
into ///-EZ-Pieces--no conversion or importing required.
The Apple III application came first. It was then it was brought over
to the Apple II side, tweaked a bit, and renamed AppleWorks. At least
this is what I recall from years ago.
That's correct--and it accounts for the very versatile memory
manager used in Appleworks.
The memory architecture of the Apple /// was sufficiently "banky"
that it caused Robert Lissner to develop an abstract interface to
store and access data structures in RAM. When he moved /// EZ Pieces
to the Apple II, he simply implemented a few more memory managers to
handle the Apple II banking, the Slinky memory card, and the popular
RAMworks-style memory card.
-michael
NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."