DOS Support - An Investigation of DOS Master

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!

DOS Support - An Investigation of DOS Master

Postby tom » Thu May 25, 2006 6:06 am

After 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
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Re: DOS Support - An Investigation of DOS Master

Postby Guest » Fri May 26, 2006 1:14 am

[quote="tom"]After 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.tom[/quote]

Actually, his name is Glen Bredon--an Apple II programming luminary.
Guest
 

Re: DOS Support - An Investigation of DOS Master

Postby tom » Wed May 31, 2006 11:39 am

Guest, thanks for the correction. We certainly want to credit the late Dr. Bredon properly. I have the mixed blessing of being at the age where I can claim senescence when suspected of hasty editing. :wink:


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


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