Re: Wanted - Apple II cards

In article <2u2dncWsWJ6DMf_ZnZ2dnUVZ_sCdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Don Bruder wrote:
In article <E6r8g.47$rj1.169@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Martin Doherty <martin.doherty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


KPR wrote:


I am looking for the following cards for my Apple II's

- A wildcard ( of any version )
- A Clock card ( any other than a Mountain, hopefully a PRODOS
compatable card )
- A Saturn / Clone 128k card
- An Apple ROM Card ( the one with the Red switch )
- Applecat Modem or expansion cards

If anyone has these and would like to share or sell at a reasonable
price.. ( Someone on eBay has a Thunderclock for sale at $199US )
please let me know..

KPR..

PS.. I'm in Toronto Canada M5J-3A5 so please quote shipping as well..
Thanks



For the clock, maybe you'll consider the No-Slot Clock (for sale at
gse-reactive.com), it is about $32 and doesn't take up a slot, instead
fitting underneath one of your socketed motherboard chips. Comes with
own built-in 10 year rechargeable battery (non-replaceable).

I don't know what its compatibility is at a software level, I vaguely
recall that it might look like a Thunderclock?

Martin


An NSC looks *NOTHING* like a Thunderclock to ProDOS "in the raw".

However, with some heavy hatchet work, it *IS* possible to "Sourceror"
the driver, chop out a bunch of extraneous stuff, re-org and reassemble
it with only the "read" routine, then cram it in the space ProDOS
provides for the Thunderclock driver - With 4 bytes to spare, if I
recall the results of my surgery for just that purpose correctly. (Part
of my goal was to "hijack" the "ATINIT" file to install the clock driver
at boot - I managed complete success on that score.)

Nice hack--but the NSC software already does the job. It runs as the
first .SYSTEM file on the disk and then loads the next one.

It didn't, "back then" - What I got with mine was about as cheesy as
they come: You want to install the clock driver? Put BASIC.SYSTEM first
on the disk, and put this basic program on the disk as the startup
program. It consisted of a huge string of POKEs (Not even reading from
DATA lines - Straight up "POKE literal address,literal value"
statements) that built it in place!

Hardwired like that was *SEVERELY* nasty. What happens when comes the
day when they re-ORG the Thunderclock driver location in ProDOS, and the
"loader" program proceeds to stomp all over something critical? I'll
tell ya what happens: *ARGH!*

I got tired of having to mess with it to have the clock on a
more-or-less permanent basis, and used the described procedure to
reverse-engineer it, figure out what was being done and how, re-code it,
and wrap it in the ATINIT file that was *SUPPOSED* to be used for
setting up AppleTalk networking. Since no machine I ever owned before I
got a Mac had *ANY* ApleTalk capabilities (or an AppleTalk network to
connect to!) I quickly came to the conclusion that it would be a
super-clean way to load various bits of code, and proceeded to use it
for exactly that to install my re-crafted version of the NSC read
routine where the ThunderClock driver originally lived. And as I said,
I'm pretty sure I rememeber my re-write did the job with 4 bytes to
spare. Memory is hazy, but it seems to me there was a table of bytes
that, when read as a bitstring, got fed into the NSC via STA
instructions, then once the string had been completely "sent", you
turned right around and started reading bits via LDA and shift to get
the bitstring that was the current clock value. *REALLY* dodgy code in
the originally supplied driver.

Setting it is another story, and has to be done via external program,
since there's no way to talk the SET_TIME MLI command into doing it. You
don't have a driver on board for it to use - I had to bload or POKE an
ML routine, set up some locations within it with the date/time values,
then call the ML to do the "heavy lifting", since there was no way to
shoehorn the complete driver into the Thunderclock space, and
realistically speaking, there wasn't anyplace else "safe" (As in
wouldn't get creamed across *.SYSTEM file switches) to park it as a
reasonably permanent part of the OS.

Setting software is also part of the NSC package.

BTW, even the Thunderclock required a separate program to set it--the
ProDOS clock driver is a "read"-only routine, and there isn't any
SET_TIME MLI command.

I would have sworn there was... <shrug> What can I say? It's been -
uh... well, a whole bunch of years since I was last seen playing with
the MLI. I've lost a lot of knowledge to disuse, and probably muddled
things together, and who knows what else after this long?

--
Don Bruder - dakidd@xxxxxxxxx - If your "From:" address isn't on my whitelist,
or the subject of the message doesn't contain the exact text "PopperAndShadow"
somewhere, any message sent to this address will go in the garbage without my
ever knowing it arrived. Sorry... <http://www.sonic.net/~dakidd> for more info
.

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