by troublemaker64 » Sat Feb 14, 2009 1:40 am
Ok here it is. The program was so short, I decided to list it here.
A couple of things first.
You will not be able to format your entire cffa card to use all the drives until I have finished writing the "disk.editor/block.editor" program to allow you to do so. A 1 GB cffa card can have up to 31 drives - a 4 GB can have 123 drives and a 8 GB card can have 247 drives, and these can vary slightly depending on the cffa card.
Until the editor is ready, you can still see how this driver works to access other drives. It has a very simple syntax.
You just append a ",Vd" where d is the drive # from 1 to max drives your card can hold
ie ]CATALOG,V39 will catalog drive #39
Please test on a newly formatted cffa card to get familiar with the driver and confirm it works. As, you all know the drill. "I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DATA LOSS"
Once you have all the drives formatted, then boot into the card by holding the 'M' key and reduce the number of devices to 1 (one). Save and then boot.
You will have to write your own installer to install the driver between Basic.system and its buffers, but as is, will work at its current position at $4000.
4000:A9 0C 8D 1A BF A9 40 8D 1B BF 60 D8 A0 05 AD 68
4010:BE F0 30 D9 F8 05 B0 2B AA CA 8A 99 F8 04 A2 50
4020:2C FF CF 2C 00 C5 20 DE CB A5 42 D0 07 A0 FF A2
4030:FF A9 00 60 C9 02 D0 02 38 89 18 20 20 CB B0 02
4040:A9 00 60 A9 02 60 00 00
I have triple checked the listing, so there are no errors. Make sure the program is typed in correctly and then do a trial run. I have it set up for slot 5, so if you want to change the slot, then you need to change the bytes at $400C to $0n and $401F to $n0, where n is the slot number your cffa card is installed in.
With an 8 GB cffa card installed in slot 5 you can use V1 to V247.
You can do a "PREFIX,S5,V3" or "CATALOG,S5,V3" and verify that the third drive that you previously formatted is being listed.
now you can "SAVE" and "LOAD" a file just like normal without entering any coordinates.
If you try to catalog a drive that was formatted to hfs, you will get a I/O error.
I am also looking into copying DATA/RESOURCE files from drive to drive with Prodos 8, unless someone beats me to the punch and writes a GSOS driver that takes advantage of the large cffa cards and has access to all the drives that are formatted to Prodos.
I like to keep major applications, graphics, sounds, fonts, and games each in their own drive. Usually higher up starting at drive 100.
Since the volume number has a range of 0-255, and the 4 bits of the next drive register are not programmed into the firmware, I opted out of creating support for a 108 GB, as 8 GB cffa card is huge by apple ii standards. Since the driver table for drive 2 is not being used, It would not take much to patch ,d1 and ,d2 to work with a 16 GB card without causing any range errors and still fit within one page of memory. I believe a slight firmware change is in order, so for now 8 GB will have to be the limit.
Enjoy!