Showcasing the Apple II

For discussions about the use of your CFFA card. Feel free to start threads about anything you are doing with your card. Tell us about your system, your CF card, how many drives, and especially anything cool you might be doing with your Apple II. Also, if anybody is hacking the CFFA please post info here!

Showcasing the Apple II

Postby tom » Tue May 16, 2006 1:01 pm

My application is to use the CFFA as a way to Showcase the Apple II through its best applications. This work about 40% complete at this time

I am using the CFFA on an Apple IIe, which I recently acquired from ebay. This machine has been upgraded to an A//e. Like Rich, I am excited about the possibilities of an extended life based on reliable, non-mechanical, compact, ~gigabyte storage, for the Apple II. I like the thought of a totally solid state, quiet, machine, with and a potential lifetime (ignoring hole trapping, electron tunneling, metal diffusion and such) of 100 years (not quite AII forever, but sufficient for this century).

The CFFA uses fixed 32 MB Partitions. The image files for these CFFA 32 MB Partitions (CFFA Volumes) can serve as a medium for distributing the best of Apple II DOS, ProDOS, CP/M and Pascal public domain software. I will share the CFFA Volumes that I have assembled to-date. The url for their location is given below.

For my system I formatted four CF drives: slots 7 with drives 1 and 2, and similarly for slot 4. See the thread on “Tools for CFFA DOS Volume Creation” for details. I had an Apple II after it first came out, for just over three years, then sold it (for professional reasons, I switched to a PC.) There is a twenty year gap in my AII knowledge. Thus, I would appreciate feedback concerning gaps/errors in my AII knowledge/perspective.

This is the way I have my CFFA Volumes organized.
Slot 7, drive 1, my boot drive, has ProDOS programs: utilities, editors/word processors, programming languages.

Slot 7 drive 2 is a ProDOS drive in which DOS.Master (DM) was used to create 200, 560 sector, DOS 3.3 volumes/partitions (lower case “v”/”p”) for DOS storage. These 200 volumes are divided into four sections. There is one section, each, for DOS game, education, business and utility programs. I have extended a DOS program selector from Vince (“Vince Menu”) to “TV Menu” to select amongst the four categories and their individual programs. This eventually may have to be expanded beyond the 200 volumes as more “Showcase” programs get identified. At present there are 42 games, 21 Eds, 2 business and DOS files that I have loaded. The programs that can presently be run are limited to those in standard DOS format, i.e. they can be executed with a BASIC RUN or BRUN statement.

In the process of loading these programs onto the CFFA I ran into four barriers which limits the usability of the CFFA in running some Apple software. These barriers are:
1. A means of disk swapping, or volume stepping, to allow programs with multiple disks to be run.
2. A means of booting a nonstandard disk image (one that cannot be executed by running a BASIC, Object or System file) to run the application. These images usually come from “copy protected” disks.
3. A program to create a catalog list of all the programs/disks/volumes on a CFFA Master.DOS Volume to keep track of, potentially, hundreds of disk images.
4. It would also be convenient to have a program that would load a list of DOS files and disk images into DOS.Master DOS volumes.

For optimum showcasing of CFFA Volume collection, a list each of those DOS and ProDOS “Showcase programs” is needed.

The above CF Volumes, TV Menu, and list of Showcase programs are in the folder labeled “CFFA” at:
https://www.onlinefilefolder.com/index. ... um=1147686
The user ID and password are “publik.” Popup blocking has to be disabled to access this folder.


Tom
tom
 
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Apr 13, 2006 3:39 am
Location: Cape Coral, FL

Quick question

Postby Anonymous » Wed Mar 26, 2008 10:25 am

Tom have you expanded your image lately?
I want to add the zork and scott adams adventures to your format but really dont know how to do that.
Anonymous
 


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