Hard drive questions

[Gumdoc]

Hi All,

 

So I was able to find a complete //GS with everything I wanted, my only question is about the hard drives. I never owned a hard drive during the time I owned a //e and //gs, so apologies if these questions are basic.

 

I own a Floppy Emu that I use with my //e that works great. It has been recommended that I consider either a CFFA3000 or the MicroDrive options, both from ReActiveMicro. I went through the manuals for both cards but think I'm more confused than I was before, lol. A few questions:

 

1. Besides what I assume is a faster boot and hard drive partitions, what do these card give me that I don't have with a FE boot setup?

2. What is the main difference between the cards and would one be a better choice considering I already have the FE?

3. Lastly, how (if any) are the hard drive images different than the .dsk/.woz/.do images I have? For example, many of the games I have are between 4-8 sides, when it comes time to change disks, I go into the FE and choose the requested disk and select it. If the images were on a hard drive, would the system know that the next disk is on the drive and just select it? Or, is there some different format that I would use as a hard-drive ready file that eliminates that, using Ciderpress or similar?

 

Sorry for all the questions ?

[The Usotsuki]

This is where the ProDOS cracks come in.

 

ProDOS being capable of supporting a greater number of drive types including hard drives and flash devices, I came up with an idea some time ago to start doing ProDOS ports of games - and while at first it didn't take up much, qkumba started improving on my ideas.  Our ProDOS cracks will, at least theoretically, install on and run from hard drives just fine.

 

(Before me, MECC had a similar system for their own software.)

[Gumdoc]

How are the GS-specific files different? When I open up most of your .po files, there's only 4-5 files and a loader.system I assume I can boot from if I am using a file explorer. But, the GS .po has many more files and no loader file...

 

Is the ProDOS.sys the usual file to choose?

Edited September 26, 2021 by Gumdoc
Forgot to add one thing...

[The Usotsuki]

GS/OS is more complex.  Usually the boot file is SYSTEM/START or, if that doesn't exist, the first SYS16 file in /.

 

On ProDOS disks, PRODOS is the kernel which you only need one copy of on the disk, and xxxxx.SYSTEM (usually LOADER.SYSTEM on qkumba's cracks; they vary more on mine) is the file that boots the game.

[Keatah]

12 hours ago, Gumdoc said:

3. Lastly, how (if any) are the hard drive images different than the .dsk/.woz/.do images I have? For example, many of the games I have are between 4-8 sides, when it comes time to change disks, I go into the FE and choose the requested disk and select it. If the images were on a hard drive, would the system know that the next disk is on the drive and just select it? Or, is there some different format that I would use as a hard-drive ready file that eliminates that, using Ciderpress or similar?

Things "images" are outside of the knowledge of what native Apple II software knows. It knows volumes and slots and drives.

 

To achieve what you want to do you'd need to mount each image to a slot/drive. And then the Apple II game would need to where each disk is located - basically be coded to look in drive #2 for side #2 and so on. Most all games are coded to ask you to swap the disks by hand. And you have to do that with the floppy drive emulator.

 

ProDOS has folders bigger capacities so all the stuff can be put on one volume. And again, the software has to be coded to use that structure.

 

Hard drive images and .dsk/.woz/.do are basically container files - with a structure the selected Apple II OS (ProDOS or 3.3) understands.

 

The WOZ format contains enough supporting information to duplicate the copy-protection present on most Apple II games. Whereas DSK is a straight dump of a disk as if you were sending it via an oldschool modem. DO is similar.

 

[Iamgroot]

Just to expand on Usotsuki's notes, the 2 main differences for IIGS files compared to regular Prodos files is, most IIGS files are programmed in 16-bit native language and many IIGS files contain forks that the 8-bit Prodos cannot use.

 

And there are some 8-bit Prodos files that contain 16-bit IIGS instructions that cannot be run on any of the 8-bit computers.  This is where it pays to read the manual/instructions for the game or program to see what the hardware recommendations are.

[GameGeezer]

I use a ZIP drive on the High Speed SCSI card with DMA (and a termination diode mod).