Re: ADTPro question or idea

[schmidtd <schmidtd@my-deja.com>]

On Oct 1, 3:04 pm, Warren Ernst <wer...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, I know about all of the other options you've suggests, and have
> used them all, and I think most of them suck in one way or another (or
> have a fatal flaw).
Such is the nature of our platform. :-)

> I never meant to suggest that any feature was intentionally hidden in
> ADTPro. My thinking was that perhaps when you rewrote it, you had a
> debugging feature that just sent over the DSK (or whatever) file and
> then just wrote it to the disk rather than making an actual disk out
> of it.

Ah, I see.  When I started, I didn't have a CFFA card yet - so lacking
any high-capacity storage of any kind, my only option was to write
real diskettes.  So the capability to drop the .dsk file was never
part of the plan.  I can see it easily, though - and I already have
data in easy-to-feed-ProDOS-MLI blocks...

> That's what I would love to use. It's just that I find running
> ADTPro over an Uthernet card is actually much faster and convenient
> than using a HD Floppy to copy the file over many times.

So, transferring the disk image as a file makes some sense.  Using the
"platform" to send an arbitrary file makes less sense to me.  It would
probably work, except for the fact that there's currently an inherent
dependency on file sizes being divisible by block sizes (512 bytes).
And then there's the potential for confusing the weekend retro'er:
"let's see, I have this .dsk image... send it to the Apple... save
it... hey, how come Karateka won't boot?!?"

> I personally would welcome it is ADTPro became a "communications
> platform." It's not like there are a lot of other options for the
> Uthernet card. And at least yours works reliably.

You clearly haven't used it on a big network yet. ;-)  UDP is nice and
compact, but recovery from failure is a problem.