Re: bsq files

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Paul R. Santa-Maria wrote:

>Bill Garber wrote:
>> Or as I do, simply run the intended file from the
>> BASIC prompt. For the No Slot Clock I did exactly
>> that. I figured I only needed to run it once since
>> once the patched ProDOS was on my CFFA drive, I would
>> not need to run it again. ;-)
>
>It all depends on whether the program patches the
>ProDOS clock driver in memory or on disk.  The 
>location of the clock driver was fixed in memory
>but changed on disk as different versions of
>ProDOS were developed.
>
>Obviously, if PRODOS.SYSTEM was patched then you
>only had to run it once.  If the driver was
>installed in memory then you had to run it each
>boot.

Exactly.  And IIRC, the No-Slot Clock program is a
boot-time patch of the clock driver in _memory_.

I would expect any program packaged as a SYS program
to be of this type, since a regular BRUNable program, or
even an Applesoft program, could patch the ProDOS clock
driver on disk.  SYS programs with xxx.SYSTEM names
can be run automatically on boot (without any modification
to a disk's STARTUP program).

It was considered better form to patch ProDOS in memory
than to patch it on disk, although I chose the latter method
for a clock driver I wrote.  By appending a "p" to the ProDOS
version number, though, the patched status was obvious at
boot time.

-michael

Check out amazing quality sound for 8-bit Apples on my
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/