Re: Apple Pascal and disks/HD question

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Dan Foster <dsf@globalcrossing.net> wrote:

>       I just found some Apple Pascal disk images on Asimov (I think) and
> the core tools are spread over two disk images.

Which version of Apple Pascal is it?  Version 1.0 is pretty primitive.
1.1 was a good enough version, but it doesn't work all that well on a
IIe or later machine.  1.2 had changes to improve its compatibility with
the IIe (and added support for 128K RAM) and 1.3 added support for a
wider variety of drive types.

>       KEGS only emulates 2 5.25" floppy drives (s6,d1 and s6,d2) for
> historical reasons, I believe. Is there any way to have yet another floppy
> in another slot/drive so that I could save my work files on without needing
> to do disk swaps?

Pascal only supports drive controllers in slots 4, 5 and 6, should you
find some way of gaining another emulated drive.

>       Or is it possible to format a Pascal HD partition (as a disk image)
> somehow...?

You need Pascal 1.3 for that.  It can use a card which has a ProDOS
block driver in firmware and format the entire unit as a single Pascal
volume.  This is impractical for large hard drives, but is quite usable
for an 800K floppy or a small hard drive arranged as two partitions.

In theory you could also do this with an earlier version of Pascal in
conjunction with the Pascal ProFile Manager, but you would need an
emulated ProFile hard drive to support that.

> I noticed GS/OS System 6.0.1 had a Pascal FST but when I do
> an initialize HD volume action, I only get ProDOS or HFS as choices.

The GS/OS Pascal FST is read-only (like the DOS 3.3 FST, it is used to
allow copying data from antique Pascal disks, not for creating new
ones).

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz