CF Card Microdrive for IIe Tutorial

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CF Card Microdrive for IIe Tutorial

Anyone here order the IIe microdrive from reactivemicro?

The instructions on how to transfer disk images from the web to a cfcard using ciderpress are absolutely non-existent.

Can someone here write a short tutorial on how to transfer a simple image using cider press onto the pre-formatted IIe(prodos) cf card reactive provides?

The card from what I can see has 4 partitions already installed, but ciderpress gives me no options to copy an image onto the card..and I have no idea where I should copy it, because there doesn't seem to be any organized folders at all...just a large list of utilities and files for the IIe.

Thanks

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Re: CF Card Microdrive for IIe Tutorial

So, this isn't a tutorial - and it is talking about the CFFA, which is likely the same for our purposes - but does reading through this help?

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.apple2/browse_frm/thread/cbae3cb8e8cdd280/f67a0cce597d3a9e?lnk=gst&q=cffa+ciderpress#f67a0cce597d3a9e

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Re: CF Card Microdrive for IIe Tutorial

Well, I got the disk images to the cf card through ciderpress, but the apple II doesn't see the images. Anyone know what format the .dsk images have to be for the apple IIe to read them?

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Re: CF Card Microdrive for IIe Tutorial

Oh, ok, that's an entirely different kettle of fish. You don't/can't put .dsk images on to CF cards (not until the CFFA3000 comes out, anyway). .dsk images are snapshots of 140k floppies in their entirety. As such, they don't map onto a CF card. If the .dsk in question is of a ProDOS disk, then you could copy the contents off onto a CF image. But in general, you reconstitute a .dsk image directly on to a physical floppy drive, with a tool like ADT or ADTPro.

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Re: CF Card Microdrive for IIe Tutorial

Hi guys, I just came upon this thread. I just got a MicroDrive IIe CF drive from ReactiveMicro and want to load a whole bunch of games downloaded from FTP sites onto it so my IIe can boot directly into this large library without the hassle of physical 5.25" floppies. However, like the original poster I'm really confused about how to use the card! I've downloaded CiderPress and a few .dsk images of games from Asimov, but I'm not at all clear on how I should be extracting/compiling/writing them into a volume that the MicroDrive will see as a bootable hard drive.

My questions can be broken down as follows:

1) I understand that a hard drive partition filled with .dsk files would be nonsense to the IIe since each image is a complete floppy "snapshot", but I can't figure out how to get Ciderpress to extract just the .bin files (the games) from them so I can compile them into a new volume. Or am I wrong that I have to do this?

2) What files other than the .bin game files need to be in a partition in order for my IIe to boot from it and let me choose a game to play? The CF card comes partitioned as 4x 32MB Pro-DOS partitions, so does that mean they should be bootable as-is or does something else have to be in each partition?

I'm sure there are folks reading this who are comfortable using Ciderpress with their MicroDrive, so I'd appreciate it tremendously if someone can give me a basic step-by-step lesson. I'm just conceptually stumbling here.

Thanks!
Howie

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Re: CF Card Microdrive for IIe Tutorial

Hi guys, I just came upon this thread. I just got a MicroDrive IIe CF drive from ReactiveMicro and want to load a whole bunch of games downloaded from FTP sites onto it so my IIe can boot directly into this large library without the hassle of physical 5.25" floppies.

The way to do that is through Glen Bredon's DOS MASTER. It is about the only way to use DOS 3.3 with the current crop of CF card solutions. You can find a 16 megabyte image containing a pile of games pre-loaded with a menu system already in place here:

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/masters/DOSMaster16mCF.po.gz

I'm not familiar with how you revise what's on the DOS MASTER package. As I understand it, it can address 254 virtual disks with the DOS 3.3 volume notions - i.e. CATALOG,V1-V254.

1) I understand that a hard drive partition filled with .dsk files would be nonsense to the IIe since each image is a complete floppy "snapshot", but I can't figure out how to get Ciderpress to extract just the .bin files (the games) from them so I can compile them into a new volume. Or am I wrong that I have to do this?

In some cases, you can - single-load games that just need one binary and they're done could operate that way. But you run into trouble if they expect a DOS underneath them that is different than ProDOS.

2) What files other than the .bin game files need to be in a partition in order for my IIe to boot from it and let me choose a game to play? The CF card comes partitioned as 4x 32MB Pro-DOS partitions, so does that mean they should be bootable as-is or does something else have to be in each partition?

The DOS MASTER image is a good example of how to do that. It's got a bootable ProDOS installed on it, which then immediately launches DOS 3.3 and loads up the menu system.

I'm sure there are folks reading this who are comfortable using Ciderpress with their MicroDrive, so I'd appreciate it tremendously if someone can give me a basic step-by-step lesson. I'm just conceptually stumbling here.

I'm still not prepared for a step-by-step tutorial, but perhaps others more familiar with DOS MASTER can help out. DOS 3.3 disks aren't the CF drive's forte. But DOS MASTER gets you close.

Edit: here's the readme to DOS MASTER:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/disk_utils/Glen%20Bredon%27s%20DOS.MASTER-ReadMe.txt

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Re: CF Card Microdrive for IIe Tutorial

David, thanks so much for the tips! I'll check out DOS Master and hopefully using that with my CF card will teach me what I need to know.

When I grew up with a IIe over 25 years ago I never knew anyone who had a hard drive hooked up to theirs...so on top of generally being rusty about how to use the Apple II again, the whole idea of using a CF card reader with one is very foreign to me. Super cool, of course, but very foreign.

Howie

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