Re: What is the best clock card?

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

Don Bruder wrote (about the No Slot Clock):

>Years ago, I hijacked the "ATINIT" file (A little-known, poorly 
>documented file that's similar in concept to the Mac's "Extension" 
>loading mechanism) to auto-install a tweaked driver for the beast at 
>ProDOS boot-time. Worked sweet, although it *DID* kill the originally 
>intended functionality of the ATINIT file (specifically, getting 
>AppleTalk cards fired up so the machine could talk to a file-server) 
>which was a non-issue for me, seeing as I didn't have an AppleTalk card 
>in my rig.
>
>Without that little hack of mine, you had to run an installer widget 
>(supplied with the NSC back in the day) that was written in BASIC 
>(which, obviously, required BASIC.SYSTEM on the disk - overhead I didn't 
>particularly care for at the time) before you could use the clock.

Another method, that does not hijack any functionality, is to
put the driver install into another xxx.SYSTEM program that
is directory sorted to be the first .SYSTEM file in the root
directory.  ProDOS will run that first, and then, after it
installs the driver (or whatever), the program "quits" to the
next .SYSTEM program in the root directory.

This scheme works pretty transparently, and can be cascaded
arbitrarily.  It does require a utility that can reorder a directory
(like ProSel), and, of course, it makes booting take a few more
disk accesses...

When I wrote a driver for a game port clock, I did it the "hard"
way, and wrote an installer that patched it into the ProDOS
image on the boot disk.  As ProDOS evolved from version 1.1.1,
the addresses of things started to creep outside the "windows"
that I searched for in my installer, but all I ever had to do was
widen the search window, and the installer program (written in
Applesoft, no less) could cope with all the versions produced.  ;-)

I sold quite a few of these "AppleWatch" clocks, without any
problems until the Platinum //e.  On that machine, many game
port add-ons stopped working, since Apple added 0.1mF bypass
capacitors to the "pushbutton" inputs, and they had to be
removed to use the inputs at reasonable speeds.

-michael

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