AE Ramworks with Pascal?

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AE Ramworks with Pascal?

AE's advertising for the Ramworks III card specifically says:

RamWorks III can be used as a solid state disk with DOS 3.3, PASCAL, CP/M and ProDos (up to 5,700 blocks free)!

Presumably this would require a device driver of some sort under Pascal. However, I can't find one anywhere-- it certainly doesn't seem to be on the AE software disks.

Did this ever exist?

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Re: AE Ramworks with Pascal?

Hello dramsey,
well in most cases in former days the RAMcards have been distributed with Utilitydisks.... in most cases that have been hybriddisks which contained two OS-systems on each side ( i.e. 4 OS-systems on 2 sides ) ....
so if you booted up with the system and then inserted the Utilitydisk in alternate drive you could catalog that disk in the running system .... the hybriddisk then contained a patched copyprogramm like FID the could handle the RAMcard....

in fact in the former days there have often also been programs published in the Usermagazines with sourcecode for different RAMcards..... i do have the entire bunch of the Usermagazines from Germany from 1979 till up to 1986 and a complete bunch of commercial German Apple Magazin "Peeker"..... as far as i can remember there have been published 4 or 5 contributions with programms related to that stuff...... ( if i remember correct, that also occured within Nibble.... and at US Usermagazines from IAC .....)

thankfully i have allready scanned most of the stuff, so i can search my harddisk for that.... but that will request quite a lot of time ( in the meantime more than 70 GB on the Herddisk ! ) and i´m at the moment very strong fixed with tasks related to the VCFe...... in case i can´t find it very fast - i´d have to demand you to be patient till VCFs has passed by ( 27th / 28th of April ) ... i then can perform an extended search on that topic....

sincerely speedyG

Just on the short a shot from the hip...

I just reviewed the manual .... allthough nothing is told about pascal - it tells that using the Ramfactor III as RAMdisk within DOS it works with programs that access the AppleIIe 80-col card w. AUXRAM ( 64kB). So i assume that this might also be valid at ucsd pascal and the the access-routines are same or at least similar..... the only difference is the amount of RAM availiable ( restricted at the 80 col to 64 kb ) and that probably the code must just be expanded to the additional set of bankswitches to access the rest of the card....

Up to my remembering the UCSD system has been revised to version 1.3 after the Apple IIe entered the market so the filer within UCSD might have been revised too to access the AUXMEM on the 80-col card and therefor might be able to access the RAMWORKS III as device /RAM3 within UCSD.... ?? read also for this topic page 45 to 47 in the RAMworks III manual....

that´s for the beginning just a short hint...
review also Nibble Oct 1986 and April 1987 on similar topic...

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Re: AE Ramworks with Pascal?

I did of course check all the Applied Engineering software available for the RamWorks III. I didn't see anything related to Pascal or the UCSD P System.

The 1.2 version of the P System came with replacement system files that moved all the system code into the 64K bank on an Apple 80 column card, leaving all of main memory free for code. This works fine with the RamWorks III card as well, but doesn't make use of the other 960K available on the card.

I suspect this is something they never actually got around to producing.

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Re: AE Ramworks with Pascal?

Hello dramsey,
.........
read also for this topic page 45 to 47 in the RAMworks III manual....

did you read that ?

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Re: AE Ramworks with Pascal?

You mean the part where it gives you the info you'd need to write your own driver?

Yeah, but the last time I wrote Apple drivers in 6502 code was in the early 1980s. And I never did any P System drivers.

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Re: AE Ramworks with Pascal?

Hello dramsey,
yep, that were the pages i mean.... well there are two diferent attempts to the problem...
writing a "driver" or just writing several subroutines ( probably in assembler ) to handle the switching of the pages....
UCSD pascal permits both attempts....
if using the memory in a program gaining for more memory i would think about this solution....
but if you are only looking for a simple RAMdisk to use within UCSD to store diskcontents.....
then of course a UCSD pascal RAMdisk-program would be best solution.....
at the moment it´s a similar situation to me.... it´s decades ago, that i was programming in UCSD and writing drivers and programs.... but i was rather "in depth" with that topic... ( i still have the entire source code for UCSD here on the shelve... ( some 4000 pages ) but in fact it would take quite a lot of time to make a complete program for the RAMworks III .... at the moment its not possible, as i explained because i´m running in other tasks....
i´m not through with my overview of the user-mags...... we had here in Germany within our Usergroups a own platform for programming with UCSD and that programmers had own space in the user-mags.... probably i can tell more till the end of the weekend, when i shortly take a brief review over the mags in paperform....but if you are after a finished program only ... well then you might be disappointed..... sure i have several dozends of RAMdisk programs written for DOS, ProDOS and UCSD...
but at the moment i´m not sure that one of them is specifically written for the RAMworksIII and that it was written in UCSD.....
i´ll continue with the search... but unless you don´t get a reply till the end of this weekend... well then this task will be delayed at least till beginning of March....
- at least if nobody else has something in his shelf....
up to me it´s amazing that i today have to recognize the the guys at AE nearly only targeted for the Appleworks program and proDOS and never kept their eyemark to UCSD .....
sincerely speedyG

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Re: AE Ramworks with Pascal?

Oh, I'm not looking for anyone to write the driver for me; I was just wondering if it already existed. You know, since Applied Engineering specifically mentioned it in their ad.

While we're on the subject, has anyone tried using the ProDrive RAM disk driver with ProDOS 2? It sure seems to have a lot of problems. For example, Apple the system utility program doesn't see the emulated drive, and will crash if you try to copy anything to it.

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Re: AE Ramworks with Pascal?

Hello dramsey,
first sentence - well that´s what i am looking for.....
second subject: 2 problems..... when RAMworks entered the market... proDOS was up to version 1.0.9 .....
till version 1.1.1 ProDOS didn´t move much entrypoints around..... but thereafter within a period of about 3 years they changed ProDOS from version 1.4 to 1.5 to 1.7 to 1.8 to 1.9 to 2.0 to 2.0.1 to 2.0.3 ......that was nearly each 4 Months a new version and they started shifting the entrypoints of the routines in RAM so that older software crashed........ probably it was the very first attempt of rapid prototyping in the market..... very many third party manufacturers surrendered and stopped updating their products..... similar example was the erphi diskcontroller... it works fine till proDOS 1.1.1 .... but with later versions the controller crashes... it would require a update of the eprom to work with later versions of proDOS.... so it seems that AE also surrendered in that "kind of development"....

The good news is that when the System 6 entered the market the RAMworks was "standard" so the OS recognized it and the system filer can use it right up from the start...

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Re: AE Ramworks with Pascal?

Sys 6 would be a good option if I had a IIgs...but then my existing RAMWorks card can't be used in a gs.

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