Re: xebec/apple questions

["Laine Houghton" <laine@intergate.com>]

> If any of you folks are interested in historical stuff like this, you
should
> check out:
>
> http://www.bbsdocumentary.com
>
> he's doing a really good job of putting together a film documentary about
> the early days of bbs's including in-depth stuff about the hardware and
> software used.
>
> Of course my favorite page...
>
> http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/photos/129ripco/
>
> thanks again to everyone for the input,
>
> -bruce
> bje@ripco.com

After your post yesterday I spent like half the day on that site .

After your post today I think you have an excellent chance of getting the
drive working. I don't think a 14 year sleep will inhibit it.

I noted you had the drive in slot 5. Any higher slot, the disk II in slot
six would boot first. I would guess you booted the faster dos3.3 and issued
the PR#5.

You could probably pull the slot 6 controller and direct boot off the hard
drive.

You might also boot a prodos floppy containing the Prosel Block Buster
program and take a look at the hard drive blocks.

Some feed back would help on the controller. With the controller in slot 5,
$C501=$20
$C503=$00
$C505=$03 is a disk  device rom byte signature.
If C5FF =00 a disk II 16 sector assumed.
If C5FF=FF a disk II 13 sector assumed.
Else this byte is the low byte entry point for an intelligent disk device.
C5FE is a status byte
bit 7 medium removable
bit 6 device interruptible
bit 5-4 number of volumes
bit 3 device supports formatting
bit 2 device can be written to
bit 1 device can be read from
bit 0 device status can be read (must be on)

C5FC-C5FE total number of blocks. If  $0000, information is obtained by
making a STATUS call.

If the controller conforms to what prodos expects then prodos is providing
the driver. If not things get a whole lot more difficult.