DIE FLOPPY DIE!

I have been unable to fix the booting issue with the floppy. When the floppy ROM is loaded, ProDOS refuses to boot. Without the ROM, ProDOS happily boots from the LPC ROM all the way into the BASIC Interpreter. From there I am able to copy files from the ROM drive to the /RAM drive in the second 64K memory bank. The 80 column text screen works perfectly also. Both of these features require the use of the memory switches, so I believe everything is working correctly. Because of these successes, I convinced myself the issue was related to the floppy emulation. I decided to boot without the floppy ROM and test the floppy hardware. After a few assembly language and BASIC test programs, the floppy seems to be working. But the system still does not boot with the floppy ROM visible. It is not that I am trying to use the ROM to boot. Either way, I am booting from the LPC ROM drive. This all seems to work. It has got to be that ProDOS is doing something different when the ROM is detected. I understand that ProDOS uses the ROM to determine if the slot holds a floppy controller. Other than that, I do not know what it is doing. It just never boots and sometimes does erratic things.

What I have decided to do now is to hide the ROM. I have to write a program that writes the disk image to the floppy, so this program will write the ROM also. Then I can do a PR#6 to boot the ROM. After I get this done, there maybe some other failure that gives me a hint to what is happening. I do not feel right about avoiding the problem, but I am getting tired of development and want to move onto the next step. I still have to build the joystick interface and test it out. When this is finished, I will basically be finished with the hardware development. There will still be some firmware / software to do, but not much. I will release a first version of my Apple only code and anyone that wants to have an Apple ][e can have a try at it.

After that, I should be able to load some of the older disk images and see if they work. I am sure there will be a need for some enhancements, but those will come more slowly.