Re: IIGs - Apple IIe programs

[BluPhoenyx <bluphoenyx@earthlink.net>]

David Schmenk wrote:
> That is what I did.  I had a small 8 MB card lying around from some 
> digital camera I had bought and upgraded.  Unfortunately the Pascal FS 
> is flat, and I believe limited to something like 78 files.  That limit 
> may have been raised in 1.2/1.3 to support smartport devices, but I 
> don't really know.  Still, 78 is about as much as you want to deal with 
> in a single directory.  The environment runs very fast (although not 
> quite Turbo Pascal - which was sold in Apple CP/M disk format - fast), 
> even on a 64K II+.  It feels much faster than my III running Pascal off 
> of a CFFA.

IIRC, it's 77 files and was never changed. I was under the impression 
(possibly wrong) the limit was UCSD based and not Apple specific. Seems 
a bit of a waste though.

I saw somewhere about using software to split a drive (logically) so you 
can store more files on large disks. Unfortunately, I can't recall 
where. It was an interesting idea. Perhaps Google could help here. I 
will try and check my archives for more info.

Speed is debatable. Floppy based usage was slow on standard II's, 
especially with one floppy.

Of course different hardware produces different results. I found it 
acceptable on my first //c with a zram card used as ramdisk. The bad 
side here, booting was slow due to loading up the ramdisk. On my //c+, 
things run smoother but I'm stuck with 3.5" which works pretty well or 
5.25" storage. Emulation runs incredibly fast (for my PC) but that would 
be expected.

IIRC, Kyan Pascal and Kix in P8  runs faster but I may be remembering 
this from emulation. It is at least a viable option. There are a lot of 
libraries available for developers and a lot of documentation as well.

Cheers,
Mike T.