Yesterday, I installed the internal/external drive switch for the Floppy Emu in the Apple //c. The video RCA cable arrived. The connectors are loose, but they work. I'm displeased, but dealing with it, as one does. When I move the //c around on my lap, I can lose the connection to the TV, but a touch brings it back.
All is not well just yet. I have no 5.25" floppies on hand. I've rectified that, but they won't be here for a while. I can switch the Floppy Emu to be the internal drive and boot from that, and I've played Frogger with it and enjoyed it. Choplifter requires a joystick. I've also rectified that, but it won't be here for a while.
But what I wanted to do was install my ABIDE system onto the micro-SD card in the Floppy Emu. Alas, I configured ABIDE (Apple/Beagle Integrated Development Environment) for my Virtual //e, which is much more robust in its hardware configuration than my stock //c. So I'll spend some time this morning in Virtual II setting up a single drive configuration.
ABIDE includes ProDOS BASIC.SYSTEM, so I can talk to the OS from BASIC, Program Writer from Alan Bird for editing Applesoft programs, Beagle Compiler for compiling those programs, and a bunch of utilities for debugging. That all fits on two drives with room for some programming projects, and I would typically move much of it to the RAM drive in the Virtual //e. To be perfectly frank, I configured the Virtual //e with a hard drive that I boot from, so I don't really need the floppies at all; but I'd set up the floppy configuration back when I had an actual Apple //e and needed to make some actual disks. I figured I'd use that with the //c, but with no physical media, I'm still effectively a 1-drive system. So I need to split the thing up across a couple of disks with the editor and debugging utilities on one disk, and the compiler on another.
Write and debug using one disk, then swap to the compiler disk when I want to play with speeding things up. That's not essential, but it was fun to see what kind of speed improvements might be realized.
This will all get much easier once I get some 5.25" disks, then I'll have a 2-drive system. More importantly, I'll be able to boot into ProDOS using the internal floppy, then be able to configure the Floppy Emu into a 32MB SmartPort hard drive.
As it stands right now, it doesn't appear that I can use the 32MB SmartPort HD as a boot drive, or the HD .IMG files on the micro-SD that shipped with the Floppy Emu aren't bootable. It's possible I'm misunderstanding something, but I tried booting into an HD image yesterday with no joy. I think I should be able to mount them from ProDOS, once I get the OS into memory, which, again, requires a floppy.
I'll get ABIDE set up, then do some more digging around to see if I can boot a HD image from the SmartPort. That would be the ideal solution. I've got the ROMxc inbound as well, and that will also afford some non-volatile storage, and it at least seems like, at this moment, that I'll be able to boot into ProDOS from ROM. That should give me access to virtual hard disk in the Floppy Emu and then just run everything from that, no floppies required.
At some point, I'd like to get a //c RAM expansion card, but there doesn't seem to be one actively on the market at the moment. So I'll have to keep an eye out. That'd give me a large RAM disk to use as the working directory, though I think the ROMxc should give me some of those advantages, minus the ability to write.
Anyway, it's fun playing around with this stuff. Chris Aldrich collects typewriters and sometimes posts images of typed cards as blog posts. Maybe I'll take a picture of my TV screen and post that!
The beat goes on...
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:19 Sunday, 25 August 2024