So, as I'm sure you all know, floppy emulators like the ReActiveMicro Microdrive Turbo use cards, like a compact flash card and even IDE drives, to emulate floppies. Each "Volume" on the Microdrive Turbo can be up to 32 MB. My question is, is there a way to use that space to create a menu of disk images that would otherwise have to boot from their own floppy, or their own Volume on the card , so that I could simply boot into one Volume on the card and choose what to run off a menu? Apparently there are a limited number of volumes that ca be added to the card because each two volumes are allocated one virtual slot. Is a menu what Ciderpress can do? I've looked at it but honestly, it's friggin' confusing. Thanks!
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As far as I know the Microdrive (Turbo) cannot do this. I have a Microdrive running in my IIGS. I know two cards with a build in menu. The CFFA3000 and the DAN ][ controller have menues. The one from the CFFA3000 can be started vie a call command. The one from the DAN ][ Controller is available at boot only.
The Xdrive also has a built-in menu: https://maceffects.com/products/xdrive-mass-storage-solutions-for-the-apple-ii-ii-iie-and-iigs
Thanks all!
You do know that you can at boot choose the partition you want to boot?
How does tihs work with the Microdrive Turbo?
You can do this sort of thing with DOS.MASTER. There is a distribution already with something like 100 games on it.
It allows you to make "partitions" that are basically DOS 3.3 disk images, then access them easily through a custom RWTS.
It is easy to add new or make a whole new collection.
https://www.applefritter.com/content/glen-bredons-dosmaster-prodos-drives
Yes, but each two volumes talk up a virtual slot. So you can't have more than several volumes.
If you partition your MicroDrive/Turbo into several 32MB ProDOS partitions, you will only be able to power-up-boot the first logical partition on the CF card.
BUT...if you install ProDOS onto other partitions (the PRODOS.SYS file) and run that from the file selector (like Bitsy-Bye in ProDOS 2.4 for instance) it will soft-boot the other partition, run ProDOS and then search for the next available executable file.
For instance, I have a 128 MB CF card in my MicroDrive/Turbo on a IIe. It's divided into three 32 MB partitions and one 16 MB partition.
The primary partition boots when the machine powers up. If I drop to Bitsy-Bye (the file elector in ProDOS 2.4) I can navigate to any of the other partitions and "boot" those.
One of them happens to be an install of Total Replay, another has AppleWorks, one (The primary partition) has some comms and file compression programs on it like ProTerm and ShrinkIt, and the last I use for basic file storage.
You hold the open-apple (option) key at boot-up and it will display a message asking which volume to boot. Just press the key corresponding to the volume you wish to boot.
Thanks for the explanation I have not been aware of this because I did not find it in the documentation.