Creating a CD for a use on an Apple IIgs?

[Sam Latella]

Has anyone created a cd on Windoze machine (windows XP/7) to be used on an
Apple IIgs?

I've got a scsi cd-rom drive attached to an Apple IIgs, but would like to
make a CD with iigs software on a windoze machine, but would like it to be
used on a IIgs, and readable.

Is it possible to do this? Where would I start? What software to use?

Thanks for any help.

Sam

[gid...@sasktel.net]

Although I have never actually created a cd on a PC, since I have Macs to do the job, I have an old application called Iomege Hotburn that I got with a cd-writer. This is an excerpt from its help document.

"Depending on the selected options, a data disc may be read on a variety of computer platforms including PC, SGI, Mac, Alpha, and Amiga, running various operating systems.

It is important to remember that it is the file system that the disc will ultimately be used on that defines which file systems to include when the disc is created. Therefore you can create a disc on a Windows operating system that can be accessed solely on a Unix system. A disc may contain numerous file systems simultaneously."

The program has the ability to add files and folders to the disk. The files would most likely be in the form of a compressed .shk format, which is a fairly common downloadable file, and which can be opened and uncompressed on a IIGS.


I don't believe this application is no longer available, but check you favorite burning software to see if it allows you to create cross platform cd's

Rob

[Rockin' Kat]

If you have the FST for ISO 9660 installed in your GS OS system folder
on the IIgs's boot disk, then you can write disks on your Windows
computer using ISO 9660 format.

Personally I have the HFS FST installed under GS OS and use an older Mac
to burn HFS format CDs because the ISO 9660 format disks will display
very short files names, whereas HFS format CDs can have file names up to
15 characters long, which are easier to make sense of when you're
rooting through the disk some umpteen months later.

-Rockin' Kat

[pitz]

There's probably even a way of creating CDs with ProDOS partitions. The first few Apple Developer CDs (the Phil and Dave CD?) had a ProDOS partition, aside from the HFS partition. Could these CDs be readable from an Apple II/e (equipped with a SCSI or IDE card)?

/pitz

[D Finnigan]

pitz wrote:
>
> There's probably even a way of creating CDs with ProDOS partitions. The
> first few Apple Developer CDs (the Phil and Dave CD?) had a ProDOS
> partition, aside from the HFS partition. Could these CDs be readable from
> an Apple II/e (equipped with a SCSI or IDE card)?

While this Apple support article doesn't answer the question specifically,
it seems to suggest yes:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA37810?viewlocale=en_US

[waynej...@gmail.com]

I haven’t tried the developers CDs on a IIe but I have burned ProDOS CDs with a Mac. They’re useable on any Apple II with a CD drive and running ProDOS. I’ve had a CD drive connected to a IIgs, IIe, II+ and a II. I’ve booted off a CD with the IIgs, IIe & II+.

Last time I made a ProDOS CD I used a Mac 7600 running OS 9. Don’t recall which version of Toast.

The way I did ProDOS CDs was by blind SCSI copy. I'd set up a Hard drive with the data and partitions I want. Then I'd hook it up to the computer with the CD burner. Leaving the hard drive off I'd boot the Mac. After the Mac had booted I'd turn on the hard drive. The reason I did this was so the hard drive wouldn't mount and so the MacOS wouldn't change or add anything to the HD. Then with Toast I'd use Device Copy to choose the unmounted hard drive and burn it to a CD. That'd give me an exact copy of the HD and if it was bootable, then the CD was bootable. Also this way the Mac doesn't need to be able to understand or deal with ProDOS.

I don’t know if there’s a way to do this on a PC

[pitz]

The method you mentioned essentially treats the CD like a hard disk, and can also be used for booting the system, like any ProDOS bootable device.

An interesting idea for the Apple IIgs is to have a bootable ProDOS CD, but subsequently take advantage of the ISO9660 or HFS capabilities within GS/OS.

From some of my notes (back when I was looking into this), this might be possible by creating a multi-session CD. However, a lot of older drives do not recognize multi-session CDs. It was primarily used for writing data incrementally to the CD in multiple "write" sessions and chaining the sessions together. And I don't even know how the IIgs FSTs treat the multiple sessions.

Another idea that will not work is using an "El Torito" boot mechanism. This was mainly for the PC (though I think nothing in the specs limits its use to the PC). The Apple II/IIgs likely does not know how to bootstrap using the El Torito mechanism.

A more probable approach is to use an ISO9660 CD with "overlaid" bootstrap systems. NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP used this to bootstrap its installation CD in multiple platforms (the NEXT systems and SPARC systems, and partially on PCs). There is a 32KB space available at the start of an ISO9660 image. Hybrid HFS/ISO9660 CDs make use of this by putting an Apple partition map into this space.

Does the SCSI card respect an Apple partition map during the boot process, to boot from a specific partition? I suspect some cards do, and some don't.

If an Apple partition map is ignored, 32KB is enough to create a ProDOS file system, but possibly containing only ProDOS. Even just adding BASIC.SYSTEM would overflow this space. Not enough to bootstrap GS/OS and load its FSTs. But there is some space available after the ISO9660 volume descriptors. Could we hide the ISO9660 volume descriptors as a single ProDOS file, and extend the ProDOS file system beyond them? Worth a try...

/pitz

[Hugh Hood]

Sam:

Not being a Windows guy I can't say for sure whether you'd find this useful,
or whether you can even make use of command-line type utilities on your
particular Windows machine, but you might wish to check out Scott Alfter's
"ProDOS/HFS Partition Table Generator" software that he uses to create
CD-ROMs that can be read on a real Apple II. This is Scott's Copyrighted
work, BTW.

From Scott's description and docs is:

"ProDOS/HFS Partition Table Generator (last updated 5 February 2003)

This doesn't directly run on a II (well, it might run on a IIGS with some
fixes), but it's useful if you want to create CD-ROMs that are readable on a
II. (I used it to make a bootable IIGS System 6.0.1 install CD.) It creates
a partition table with the specified number and sizes of ProDOS and/or HFS
partitions. You then concatenate filesystem images after the partition table
to make an image file that can be burned to CD-R, dumped to a hard drive,
etc. It's known to build and run under Linux and Cygwin; other POSIXish
environments (including Mac OS X) should also work without much fuss.
Non-POSIX environments (such as Win32 and older versions of Mac OS) may need
some tweaking."

"I threw this together as a quick hack to put my System 6.0.1 floppies onto
a CD-ROM, since I couldn't figure out how to get mkisofs to create an HFS
CD-ROM with multiple partitons. This program creates an Apple-format
partition table with the specified number of ProDOS and/or HFS partitions.
Each partition has its own volume name and size in blocks. If the first
partition is a ProDOS partition and has a file named PRODOS, the CD will be
bootable on a suitably-equipped Apple II."

Here's the link to his page. See the 3rd item down for a description and
download link:

<http://alfter.us/computers/apple2/software.aspx>


An alternative _may_ be to make/get an .iso image of the 'Golden Orchard'
CD-ROM, mount the images in Ciderpress, change the contents to what you
want, and save back under a different name. Then burn _that_ image.

Maybe, but then again, maybe not.





Hugh Hood





in article powergs-1...@macgui.com, Sam Latella at pow...@macgui.com
wrote on 11/11/12 8:03 AM:

[Scott Alfter]

In article <9245c2f9-091a-4e22...@googlegroups.com>,

pitz <pitz...@gmail.com> wrote:
>There's probably even a way of creating CDs with ProDOS partitions.

http://alfter.us/computers/apple2/software.aspx

Look for the ProDOS/HFS Partition Table Generator...third entry on the page.
Once you have your ProDOS filesystem images (generated however you like),
concatenate them with a partition table stuck before them. Burn the
resulting image with whatever software you have for that purpose. At one
point, I extracted System 6.0.1 floppy images from the files Apple makes
available on its website and made a bootable CD suitable for doing a clean
install (or an upgrade) on a IIGS. (I'm not entirely sure where that CD is
hiding, as all of my Apple II stuff is put away right now.)

_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
\_^_/ >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

[pitz]

Don't know how I missed it, but that awesome utility CiderPress can recognize and work with mixed-partition (combination of ProDOS and HFS partitions) disk images. I don't have access to an installation right now, so I'm only reading from the CiderPress features list. I couldn't tell if it supports "creating" mixed-partition disk images. Nonetheless, you can start with an image of one of those early Apple Dev CDs (they do have a bootable ProDOS as the first partition) and add/replace files within CiderPress.

Note that these mixed-partition CDs are purely ProDOS and HFS. They don't have an ISO9660 file system and are different from so-called superpositioned "hybrid" CDs where the HFS and ISO9660 file systems are overlaid upon each other. For the IIgs, this means you don't need to have HS.FST (you would only need HFS.FST).

/pitz

[gid...@sasktel.net]

I just verified that it works in Ciderpress. The Golden Orchard cd has a 20 Mb Prodos partition and a 631 Mb HFS partition. You can add and delete files freely. You may need to check the GoldenOrchard.iso files' properties first and check to make sure that read only is not selected.

Each partition has a different name, so all that is needed is to create folders under the partition name you wish to copy to.

Rob

[Sam Latella]

So, if I understand this correctly I can use Ciderpress to create the
partitions on windows as a file, and then burn them to a data cd (ISO), and
insert it into a IIgs with a cdrom and it should run?

I'll post any successful results I have.

Sam

[gid...@sasktel.net]

> > I just verified that it works in Ciderpress. The Golden Orchard cd has a
> > 20 Mb Prodos partition and a 631 Mb HFS partition. You can add and delete
> > files freely. You may need to check the GoldenOrchard.iso files'
> > properties first and check to make sure that read only is not selected.

> > Each partition has a different name, so all that is needed is to create
> > folders under the partition name you wish to copy to.

> So, if I understand this correctly I can use Ciderpress to create the
> partitions on windows as a file, and then burn them to a data cd (ISO), and
> insert it into a IIgs with a cdrom and it should run?
>
> I'll post any successful results I have.

Not quite. Ciderpress can not create the partitions. The partitions already exist on the Golden Orchard CD. But Ciderpress can view both partitions and you will be able to delete all files except the 2 partition names.

The Prodos and Basic.system system files should be copied to the Prodos partition to make it boot into Prodos

Just a note: the boot block for the Prodos partition starts on block 64 of the CD.


Rob