ProDOS program selector?

Harry Potter

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Mar 4, 2014, 2:09:47 PM3/4/14

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I have Apple 2 Oasis and CiderPress on a Win98 system and am wondering how to choose a program from a menu on a ProDOS system disk image upon startup. I believe that ProDOS supports this functionality but don't know how to use it. I've been able to create my own (dirmenu, on cc65's contribs site) for some Commodore computers but don't have the information to do that on an Apple 2.

Payton Byrd

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Mar 4, 2014, 3:17:00 PM3/4/14

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On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 1:09:47 PM UTC-6, Harry Potter wrote:
> I have Apple 2 Oasis and CiderPress on a Win98 system and am wondering how to choose a program from a menu on a ProDOS system disk image upon startup. I believe that ProDOS supports this functionality but don't know how to use it. I've been able to create my own (dirmenu, on cc65's contribs site) for some Commodore computers but don't have the information to do that on an Apple 2.

The first SYSTEM file on the disk gets loaded by default.

Steve Nickolas

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Mar 4, 2014, 7:27:46 PM3/4/14

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LOL Apple Oasis in 2014?

ProDOS 2.x exits to menu by default if no .SYSTEM file is found.

ProDOS 1.9 can be patched (http://aii.buric.co/dsk/prover2.dsk.gz) to do
the same.

-uso.

Nootrac90

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Mar 4, 2014, 10:55:27 PM3/4/14

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On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 2:09:47 PM UTC-5, Harry Potter wrote:
> I have Apple 2 Oasis and CiderPress on a Win98 system and am wondering how to choose a program from a menu on a ProDOS system disk image upon startup. I believe that ProDOS supports this functionality but don't know how to use it. I've been able to create my own (dirmenu, on cc65's contribs site) for some Commodore computers but don't have the information to do that on an Apple 2.

You could write one of your own in Applesoft and name it Startup. ProDOS would run it if BASIC.SYSTEM came into play.

D Finnigan

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Mar 5, 2014, 5:31:18 PM3/5/14

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Write a .SYS program that calls _QUIT in the ProDOS MLI. In newer versions
of ProDOS, this will cause a program selector to appear.

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Jeff Blakeney

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Mar 5, 2014, 6:51:14 PM3/5/14

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There should be a number of program selectors available. You could
check out some of these as possibilities:

ftp://ftp.gno.org/pub/apple2/prodos/utils/launchers/INDEX.txt

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have written one in Applesoft that
would work as well. I wrote one that I used for years but others were
looking for a way to launch programs and I had written an article for II
Alive about avoiding the "NO BUFFERS AVAILABLE" error when trying to
launch certain DOS 3.3 programs on a ProDOS disk and my program selector
had incorporated that so I released it as Selector v1.0 in 1996. I'm
not sure where the ShrinkIt file version might be available but there is
a disk image version on Asimov at:

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/misc/select10.gz

Just need the PRODOS file and BASIC.SYSTEM as the first .SYSTEM program
on your disk and my program with a filename of STARTUP (which it
currently is on that disk image) and you can boot right into it.

The contact information in the help file is completely out of date at
this point. Just "CUT" the obvious from my e-mail address here if you
need to get hold of me.