Re: any hard disk servers available?

["Joel" <joelbuckley54.nospam.@hotmail.com>]

"Jon Co" <jon@i-manila.com> wrote in message
a2c2f792.0302100504.7d9dff42@posting.google.com">news:a2c2f792.0302100504.7d9dff42@posting.google.com...
> I don't have a hard disk for my apple IIGS, and I'm wondering if
> anyone has written a program that allows you to run some sort of
> "server" on a PC which the GS accesses over a serial port.  If not, is
> there anything I could read on to make such a program?

To answer your original question:

Maybe.

I have used the Apple //e emulator program called Apple // Oasis.
While I have never used it, it has a companion program which allows a pc to
be used as a ProDOS hard disk over either a serial interface or maybe even a
game port interface. I don't know if it supports the //gs serial port. But
it should be worth checking out.

Writing such a program is not as difficult as it might seem. If you restrict
yourself to ProDOS, all you have to write is a routine to read or write a up
to 512 bytes of data to the remote device.

On the IBM, the job is a bit more complicated. You would have to act as a
disk controller. Set up a 32MB file and access it on as ProDOS blocks
0000-FFFF. This same file could also be used directly be emulator programs
on the host PC.