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Re: pascal system
Steven N. Hirsch wrote:
David Wilson wrote:
My Cirtech SCSI card has a unique way of allowing the use of ProDOS,
DOS3.3, Pascal 1.3 and CP/M all on the one SCSI hard drive. It allows
contigous regions of a partition to be excised from the ProDOS file
system and the SCSI card is told to use just that region (by
appropriate values for begining and end stored in screen holes). Then
you install the O/S of your choice in that area. In the ProDOS area you
have a small application that enables the sub partition and boots it.
Heh. Funny you should mention that. I used the same trick in the
CardZ180 disk driver. One of the system tools rewrites the allocation
map to carve out a partition that ProDOS cannot see, adjusts the header
information to lie about the size to ProDOS and places a marker in the
last block of the volume.
The Z180 BIOS scans for the marker and mounts the volume during boot.
If it will help, it's long past time to release the sources. The system
utilities are implemented in Turbo Modula-2, with some bits of 64180 and
6502 assembler. Somewhere I have a variant for the Z80 Applicard, but
that may not be easy to unearth. I couldn't remember the build
procedure if my life depended on it, but there are a bunch of Z-System
(CP/M on steroids) 'zex' and 'bat' scripts containing tantalizing hints
on the process. Requires Microsoft M80/L80 from the ALDS package (does
Z80 and 6502 asm and linking), a distribution of TM2 with Bill
Greathouse's fixes to just about everything and, almost certainly, a
Z-System environment on the build host.
A word of warning: Do NOT run any of Glen Bredon's repair programs on
the resulting ProDOS volume. They do their job well enough to want to
"correct" the mismatch between physical size reported by the drive
firmware and the shortened size in the volume header. Think about it
for a minute. So many folks were bit that I also shipped a utility to
correct the damage (provided you didn't copy of pile of data to the
volume in ProDOS before running it!)
Why not create a locked "file" that encompasses the CP/M disk space,
so there won't be any size discrepancy?
Do folks have any preference regarding the particular license I put my
code under? I'm tempted to GPL it unless there are well-reasoned
objections.
I also think public domain is preferable, and agree with Paul's logic.
These days, the problem isn't someone using it, it's *no one* using it!
-michael
Parallel computing for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."