DOS Support - An Investigation of DOS Master
Posted: Thu May 25, 2006 6:06 amAfter Apple developed ProDOS, it abandoned support of DOS. Dr. Greg Brendon, a math professor at Rutgers, then developed DOS Master (DM), to support use of DOS 3.3 on ProDOS. DM, and the ten page DM manual, are available from http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/System/. The ten page manual explains how to use DM, but does not detail its structure. DM has some limitations for use in Showcasing the Apple II with the CFFA.
The purpose of this thread is to serve as a collective documentation of the inner workings of DM. Three areas of investigation that would be useful, are:
1. organization/structure of the DOS volumes/partitions
2. methods to hack the FUD utility to allow its “XLIST, COPY” commands to run like DOS commands within BASIC programs.
3. a method of booting copy protected programs that cannot be executed with a RUN or BRUN statement.
Dr. Brendon made the investigative task easier by including the Merlin source files, on the DM disk, for all of the DM programs. However, consider the DM disk utility FUD, which is like the DOS program FID (does catalog, copy, etc.). The latest version of Merlin that I have, Merlin8PRO.v257.zip, does not support (i.e. it doesn’t assemble) the TTL and some of the more complex ASC syntax that are used in the FUD source file. I removed the TTL directive and replaced complex ASC statements with a combination of HEX and ASC statements and it compiled. The modified source file, FUDM.s, and the Merlin program, are in the ProDOS image, “Merlin_FUDM.dsk”, and are in the online file at https://www.onlinefilefolder.com./index ... um=1147686, with login and password: “publik”.
As more information becomes available, we will post it.
tom
The purpose of this thread is to serve as a collective documentation of the inner workings of DM. Three areas of investigation that would be useful, are:
1. organization/structure of the DOS volumes/partitions
2. methods to hack the FUD utility to allow its “XLIST, COPY” commands to run like DOS commands within BASIC programs.
3. a method of booting copy protected programs that cannot be executed with a RUN or BRUN statement.
Dr. Brendon made the investigative task easier by including the Merlin source files, on the DM disk, for all of the DM programs. However, consider the DM disk utility FUD, which is like the DOS program FID (does catalog, copy, etc.). The latest version of Merlin that I have, Merlin8PRO.v257.zip, does not support (i.e. it doesn’t assemble) the TTL and some of the more complex ASC syntax that are used in the FUD source file. I removed the TTL directive and replaced complex ASC statements with a combination of HEX and ASC statements and it compiled. The modified source file, FUDM.s, and the Merlin program, are in the ProDOS image, “Merlin_FUDM.dsk”, and are in the online file at https://www.onlinefilefolder.com./index ... um=1147686, with login and password: “publik”.
As more information becomes available, we will post it.
tom