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Re: Foreign operating system areas on ProDOS volumes



Michael J. Mahon wrote:
Willi Kusche wrote:


"Steven N. Hirsch" <shirsch@adelphia.net> wrote in message
news:<_YGdnQ3dgaJ6lIbdRVn-uw@adelphia.com>...

Yes, I used that same trick in my ProPart suite. This was a device driver and accompanying utility which allowed you to create an Applicard CP/M volume on literally any ProDOS block storage.

  Cool!  How would I go about acquiring this device driver and
accompanying utility?


Steven, why is simply removing it from the available space map
preferable to making it a ProDOS file?  Is it a concern about a
ProDOS copy making it non-contiguous?

No, the main reason is that I wanted CP/M to see it as a block device. IO does _not_ go through the ProDOS filesystem. At boot, the Applicard driver reads (I think - it's been a while) the last block of the disk to id the partition and dynamically creates the necessary CP/M data structures (block shift, block mask, etc.) as appropriate for the volume size.

It worked on absolutely anything which supported ProDOS, including the ProFile, Corvus Omnidrive and many other gadgets.

I'll see if I can get the sources together and make them available for download.

Steve