GSOS R/O ROM image for TJBoldt ProDOS Rom Drive (GSOS 6.0.1)

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GSOS R/O ROM image for TJBoldt ProDOS Rom Drive (GSOS 6.0.1)

I have made another alternate ROM Image for TJBoldt's awesome PRODOS ROM Drive. I like these cards because they are incredibly affortable to assemble and provide a fast 1MB read only storage.

 

This ROM Image might not be as useful as the ProDOS 2.4.2 image I made (honestly I don't know how useful this image is at all), however, I still felt like putting it together. And since it boots, I may as well share it. If you come across a IIGS with no disks, no cards, etc., this would let you boot GSOS and try to get off the ground in some way. Or perhaps you just need a desktop to work with the contents of your floppies while not booted from them. 

 

Here is what's contained on the disk:

 

Adv.Disk.Util and Archiver run, but I have not exhaustively tested them. 

 

As you can see the SCSI driver is present allowing access to my BlueSCSI (GGLabs SCSI card in slot 1 / "Your Card" in control panel)

 

 

Known issues: You cannot copy the system folder or files off of the ROM drive. This would be a nice one to figure out/fix. 

 

DOWNLOAD: https://photosuckit.com/IIGS_Mass_nofinderinfo_1MB_withfirmware.po

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Hi skate323k137!

Great, I have that card and Apple //gs, I'll try that one of these days. Thanks!

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Hi skate323k137!
It works, thanks! Can you add some programs for testing // GS like RAM test? I don't know //GS well, I don't know the names of the programs...
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The Apple II DeskTop will

The Apple II DeskTop will also fit on this card if you have an Apple IIe with 128K RAM: https://www.a2desktop.com/

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Macintosh_nik wrote:It works,
Macintosh_nik wrote:

It works, thanks! Can you add some programs for testing // GS like RAM test? I don't know //GS well, I don't know the names of the programs

 

Cool to see, thank you for trying it out!

 

If you can find the program(s) you want to use, let me know. If the utility is a GSOS application or can be launched from GSOS, and is under 200KB in size, you could open this image in an emulator like GSPlus, delete the adv.disk.util and archiver, and replace it with that utility. The firmware block should be unaffected and you can burn it to an EPROM after saving / leaving the GS emulator. In the emulator, it will act as a read/write disk since it's not physically written to a ROM yet. 

 

On the other hand I have made a utility ProDOS 2.4.2 ROM image for this same card as well. If there is a testing utility for IIgs that runs under ProDOS I may be interested in adding it to that disk image, and I have a lot more room left there (about 500K left, without removing anything already on there). https://www.applefritter.com/comment/99406#comment-99406 

 

Also, related to IIgs most specifically, I put in an issue/request to have the ESC key skip this card on boot. This would be very useful for FloppyEMU owners or people using disk drive applications that require direct boot. I haven't tested the new firmware yet, but it should work. https://github.com/tjboldt/ProDOS-ROM-Drive/issues/14

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skate323k137 wrote:On the
skate323k137 wrote:
On the other hand I have made a utility ProDOS 2.4.2 ROM image for this same card as well. If there is a testing utility for IIgs that runs under ProDOS I may be interested in adding it to that disk image, and I have a lot more room left there (about 500K left, without removing anything already on there). https://www.applefritter.com/comment/99406#comment-99406 

 

So I had just started digging into firmware code and stuff in TJ's repo but didn't get too far. I'm interested in learing more about how to construct my own binary for the EPROM. I'm about to post a messsage about troubleshooting a mobo issue that prevents disks from booting but in my basic testing I found the card does boot fine. So I thought I'd start constructing a image full of tools like computer inspector, RAM tester and any other diagnostics I can round up. But... then reality hit and I realized I don't know anything about the menu and disk structure other than maybe each program is in a directory and launched from there.

 

Are there tools or docs for how to create the eprom binary?

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I could make a more detailed

I could make a more detailed tutorial but this is a high level.

 

First, if you don't know the ProDOS boot order of operations, read the Bitsy Bye documentation. It will tell you what order to put your first few files. 

 

Now, there are 2 ways I've made these images, I prefer the 2nd. For both, download the repo files, and locate the Blank drive with firmware image. It's in the firmware directory on Github, just like the Games with BASIC image TJ provides. 

 

Method 1 is to use an emulator like GSPlus, boot up using a working GSOS boot disk image, and then mount the blank drive with firmware .po file. You can then use the GUI to drag and drop files from within GSOS. Upon saving and exiting the file will now have the content, so immediately rename it! It is now ready to burn. 

 

Method 2 is to open the blank drive with firmware .PO in CiderPress in Windows. Copy it to a new file first, because many times CiderPress changes are jnstant. Then follow the Bitsy Bye instructions to copy what you need from a source disk in another window in the proper order. 

 

If you need to boot a DOS floppy, you'll want it to take slot priority, or try the ProDOS card in slot 7 with the new firmware and hold ESC on boot to see if the floppy controller boots. Or, on my ProDOS 2.4.2 image, there are boot slot programs in the Bitsy Bye menu. Those should work too. 

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Thanks, the GS method does

Thanks, the GS method does sound like the easiest and straight forward method, I'll give that a try after reading the Bitsy Bye stuff.

 

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No problem. The main reason I

No problem.

 

The main reason I recommend a quick read of the Bitsy Bye docs is it explains what file will be booted. Just remember the first SYS file will be booted; the first one in the order they are copied to the disk (prodos catalog), not alphabetical. 

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skate323k137 wrote:No problem
skate323k137 wrote:

No problem.

 

The main reason I recommend a quick read of the Bitsy Bye docs is it explains what file will be booted. Just remember the first SYS file will be booted; the first one in the order they are copied to the disk (prodos catalog), not alphabetical. 

Took two tries but got your image updated with a directory for RamTester v1.4. Thanks for the help!

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jeff d wrote:skate323k137
jeff d wrote:
skate323k137 wrote:

No problem.

 

The main reason I recommend a quick read of the Bitsy Bye docs is it explains what file will be booted. Just remember the first SYS file will be booted; the first one in the order they are copied to the disk (prodos catalog), not alphabetical. 

Took two tries but got your image updated with a

If your only change was adding RamTester, would you want to submit a pull request or send me a copy of the updated version? I posted this image to github along with a couple others.

https://github.com/Alex-Kw/ProDOS-ROM-Drive-Images

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