Hard Drive card for replica 1 and Apple 1 testing

Rich Dreher who created the CFFA card for the Apple II line of computers giving a low cost, solid state compact flash card option to the Apple II has designed a compact flash card for the Apple I and replica 1 computers. This will give storage options previously never available to Apple 1 and replica 1 owners.

The problem: Since there never was any file type handling system available for the Apple 1, a built on menu driven system is being created. This will allow the user to load and store programs from a menu as well as catalog the compact flash card. This is a totally new suto operating system that hopefully will fit in 4K of EEPROM but there is room for 8K.

The great news: Looks like the cart will be able to read/write to PRODOS partitions! Since this will be only a simple file handling program it won't be able to go into the directory structure but will be able to read/write to the root partition. Transferring between Apple I and Apple II computers will now be a snap using Ciderpress. I've seen photo's of the card on a replica being able to catalog the prodos directory. I'll try and get those photo's up soon.

What's left: There is no direct file access through BASIC. In other words, no openning files reading and writing to files through BASIC. Hopefully somebody will produce some code in the extra EEPROM area on the card that can do this through machine language.

I'll be helping out Rich anywhere I can on this project and I really encourage anybody who might be interested to let Rich know you want one. The card is a 44 slot edge card for the Apple 1 but I have finished a prototype card that gives 3 slots to both the Apple 1 and replica 1 computers. I'll get updated info out when that is available.

Rich's web site:

http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c=projects/CFforAppleII/main.php

Vince