Re: Apple //e Dated 1984

To: ferdimh
ferdimh wrote:
On Dec 15, 9:51 am, "Guillaume Tello" <houten....@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Justin" <N...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit dans le message de news:
fjvp2a$2j...@xxxxxxxxxxx

So I'm wondering... What kind of hard drive can I get for it?
I think that a CFFA would be nice: plugged into an expansion slot, it
comes with a CompactFlash card on it and acts like a hard drive.
Compatible with Prodos, you can then use Dosmaster to create DOS volumes
on it to re-use your old stuff.

I don't really like the idea of a hard drive on the Apple ][.

I felt this way at first but then I found myself using larger disk volumes on emulators. It was very useful when working with disk images and archives found online.

Floppies ave several advantages: they can be write-protected by
hardware (which works VERY reliable, unless you have an old (buggy)
DuoDisk).
They can be stored in secure places. When they aren't in the drive,
the can't be clobbered.
Just think how angry you would be, if you just wrote an assembly
language program, launched it, and it clobbered ALL your data at
once.

I must say that I have never done this to any disk. Having said this, I will probably destroy my next floppy :)

Though recovery may be possible, it will be a lot of work.

This is an advantage of CF, you can use a PC or Mac to keep a backup image and quickly rewrite it to the CF.

And I like to have something to touch, e.g. if I want to use Bag of
Tricks, I just throw in the disk and reboot. I don't like to fiddle
with menus to select another volume.

This I tend to agree with. I still like using floppy disks but... I also have some use for large volumes as well. I prefer most of my DOS 3.3 stuff on floppy but years ago when I got a ZRam for my 2c I got used to using it for some DOS and Pascal work. Oddly, I never got a 3.5 drive until 1999. Of course the PC 3.5 drives ruined them for me. The failure rate for PC 3.5 floppies was ridiculous.

It should be said though, one can touch the CF. You just can't swap it like a floppy.

The ProDOS subdirectories aren't really supported by some software
(e.g. S-C Assembler: one always has to type in the whole path) making
the the use of a complex directory structure(which is needed, if you
have big volumes) difficult.

In some cases, developers didn't have large volumes either. Many simply didn't grok (wow my spell checker knows this term) the functionality of subdirectories. Others liked to use short path names as well and perhaps suspected everyone else did.

I tend to use just a few subdirectories and keep the nesting small. As an example, using HyperC or Aztec C is much easier when using short names and simple paths such as /hd/bin. In the case of S-C assembler, you could simply use one directory and have another to store the backups of your source files. I also tend to have multiple images for my SC card. My hard disk on the GS is not so flexible (G) and has been relegated to storage.

And I don't know what the space is needed for. I have about 40 disks
of 640KB, which all aren't full and many are just backup copies. A lot
of stuff is doubled on other disks, so I get to a total of about
5-10MB of data.

Sorry to here that. There is a plethora of interesting II material available online to feed your hobby. Some of it is quite good. I would go on about my collection but...

IMO the only sensible use for a hard disk would be to put the system
and all utilities needed on it and write-protect it. I don't really
trust the system here, because there is no memory protection and so
on.

Actually, large volumes work quite well. There are a number of shells available which make working with large volumes and ProDOS quite easy. I prefer ECP8 but Davex, ProSEL, Command.com and others work quite well. There are also a few GUI's for those who want to force that interface on their hardware.


Cheers,
Mike T
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A2Central.com - Your total source for Apple II computing.
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