Re: Apple Pascal and disks/HD question

[dsf@globalcrossing.net (Dan Foster)]

In article <1ff4sex.hwb47h1460z7kN%dempson@actrix.gen.nz>,
David Empson <dempson@actrix.gen.nz> wrote:
>
>Which version of Apple Pascal is it?  Version 1.0 is pretty primitive.

I've got version 1.1, alas. I knew 1.2 had come out later, and never
realized there was a 1.3. Hrm. Guess I'll go hunting that down, then.

>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.

Ahhh, neat.

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

Ahh-ha! Definitely worth a try. Worst case, source code is available and
that could probably be fudged in, one way or another ;)

>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.

Ah, very nice. It's actually not a problem with HD images -- no sweat in
dedicating the entire thing to Pascal, although do concur that most likely
wouldn't need to exceed 800K of storage.

>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).

Ahh-ha! That explains *that*, thanks ;)

-Dan