Installing Games on the IIgs Hard Drive, What am I Doing Wrong??

[Tempest]

This weekend I've been trying to install various Apple IIgs games on my hard drive and I've had limited success. Using the IIgs Gaming Fairway as a guide as to what games are hard drive installable, I tried to copy over the disk contents to folders on my hard drive. Most games kept searching my disk drives for a disk over and over again before failing. What am I doing wrong?

I understand that some games require the directory to be named something specific, is there any list of those games out there? Some of the game manuals are available online with these instructions in them, but most are not or don't mention anything about hard drive installs.

My goal is to get all the games that are hard drive installable on my IIgs, but so far I'm not doing very well. Has anyone else out there tried to do this?

[Alex Lee]

Let’s start from the beginning :-)

What configuration does your IIGS have? I’m guessing you have a hard
drive of some sort. Is it a SCSI hard drive and if so what card? I know
you have ADTPro setup. Please state everything else you have in your
hardware setup (memory, accelerator or not, etc, etc).

The quickest way of you having access to every hard drive installable
game, app and educational software would be to directly copy each of
the pre-configured 32 meg disk images found on the homepage of ‘What is
the Apple IIGS?’ to your hard drive.

This would save you a LOT of time because of instead of going through
each of the individual floppy archives and finding disappointment when
I have erroneously stated whether some apps are hard drive installable
(and I apologise for that, but there are many factors involved as to
why I might have mistakingly said a program was hard drive installable,
most of all is I probably copied a program to a hard drive image and
tested it without ejecting the original floppy image, which the program
would have checked when launched. Obviously, the original floppy needs
to be ejected to truly test whether a game can be run from a hard drive
by itself. I am updating the details for individual archives that
aren’t HD installable, so thanks for the feedback).

So, there are two possible solutions to copy the 32 meg images over:

1) If you have a SCSI hard drive connected to your IIGS and you have
SCSI in your Windows based PC (unlikely) I think you can, in theory,
connect your IIGS SCSI drive (if it’s an external drive) to your PC and
use CiderPress to directly copy over 2images to hard drive partitions
on your SCSI drive in exactly the same way you can do to older CFFA
cards. I haven’t done this myself, so someone else will have to confirm.

2) Another suggestion that will require confirmation (David Schmidt if
you’re around! :-) as I’ve never owned a PC or an Apple IIGS compatible
SCSI hard drive would be can ADTPro be used to copy the contents of 32
meg 2images from a PC directly over to a IIGS? I’ve never used ADTPro
myself because I’m strictly an Apple guy and I’d need to get a USB to
serial adapter to connect my IIGS and Mac. That’s an extra expense I’m
wanting to avoid because copying everything over to my CFFA3000 from a
Mac is VERY easy, and copying stuff over to my older CFFA2 is
relatively easy too, although requires a PC or a Windows XP install on
a Mac with Bootcamp,VMWare or Parallels, etc.

Can anyone else make any other suggestions?

- Alex
--
http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/

[Tempest]

My IIgs has the following:

ROM 3 with System 6.0.1
4 Meg memory card
7 MHz Transwarp card
Stereo card
Uther ethernet card (I used ADTPro with this)
Apple High Speed SCSI card (rev C)
120 Meg hard drive partitioned into four 30 Meg drives


I agree that copying over your preloaded hard drive image would be easiest, but as you pointed out I'm not sure how you get it over. I don't have a PC with a SCSI card. I don't think ADTPro would work because it can only transfer images to a disk drive or the RAM disk. Unless there's another option I'm missing.

[David Schmidt]

On 2/11/2013 9:45 AM, Tempest wrote:
> I don't think ADTPro would work because it can only transfer images to a disk drive or the RAM disk. Unless there's another option I'm missing.

Sure it will. You'd want the block sizes to be pretty close (and ignore
the "size mismatch" warning if they aren't exact). Also be sure there's
nothing on the partition you're about to overwrite... but it'll lay down
a whole 32MB drive's worth of a disk image if you want.

[Tempest]

ADTPro will see my hard drive? I don't think I've ever seen it show up as a disk in the menu.

[David Schmidt]

Sure it will. Boot GSOS like usual, except hit the '8' key right after
reset or power-on to just boot into ProDOS 8. That should have enough
underpinnings to see your hard drive. You can then start ADTPro from a
floppy or from the hard drive itself, wherever you put it.

[Tempest]

Interesting, I don't think I've ever tried that before. Of course even if this works my problem is that my partitions are only 30 Megs and the hard drive images are 32 Megs. Something tells me that won't work out very well. I've never tried to repartition a hard drive on a IIgs before (mine came that way). How hard is that to do?

[David Schmidt]

On 2/11/2013 12:02 PM, Tempest wrote:
> Of course even if this works my problem is that my partitions are only 30 Megs and the hard drive images are 32 Megs. Something tells me that won't work out very well. I've never tried to repartition a hard drive on a IIgs before (mine came that way). How hard is that to do?

I wouldn't bother. As long as the 32MB image doesn't really have all
32MB used - i.e. as long as there's some blank space at the end - it'll
work anyway. And if it is really chock full, the only things that won't
work are the games that are on the "missing" 2MB.

[Bill Garber]

"David Schmidt" <schm...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:kfb6ed$f3k$1...@dont-email.me...

I start ADTPro from GSOS, and it drops me into ProDOS automagically.
This can be done via floppy disk as well as from hard drive as I do. 8o)

Bill Garber
http://www.sepa-electronics.com

[David Schmidt]

Well, GSOS can play havoc with timing (especially of the serial port,
but less so of the Uthernet). See the "IIgs/GSOS Note" at the end of
the section here:
http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/starting.html#Starting_the_Client

[Michael J. Mahon]

Wouldn't that leave the volume metadata, including the bitmap, incorrect
for the smaller actual volume?

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon

[David Schmidt]

Yes - but only in that final (non-existent) 2MB. Interactions with the
bitmap in the lower 30 would still function as normal. Any allocations
or access above that would fail in interesting ways. Kind of like a 64k
memory map that isn't fully backed with memory. It's all addressable,
but it's only really useable when there's something backing it.

[Michael J. Mahon]

So it would be best to run a "disk fixer" like ProSel to clean the volume
up before a game tries to save something.

[David Schmidt]

What would be best is to create a disk image of the exact size you want
to make a clone of with CiderPress, copy all the files you can until you
run out of room, then decide what to sacrifice if you do in fact run
out. Then send that correctly-sized image back to the hard drive.

[Alex Lee]

Problem: I fill each of my IIGS hard drive images to the brim. For
example, I think my Action Games partition only has about 500k of
available space.
--
http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/

[Alex Lee]

I'd agree with that.

However, with a 120 meg drive, and making partitions of 32 meg, the
fourth partition will come up short of 32 meg. It certainly won't be
possible to copy over all my pre-prepared images over.
--
http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/

[Alex Lee]

The easiest way to re-partition would be to use Advanced Disk Utility
that comes with System 6.

However, you could re-partition your drive to 32 meg volumes for the
first three partitions, but then you'd have a smaller fourth partition.
Meaning you'd only be able to copy over 3 of my 32 meg partitions.

Something else you might want to consider – why not setup the
partitions you want with CiderPress or under emulation? Create disk
images using CiderPress that match your current 30 meg partitions, then
selectively copy (i.e. copy only those games you really want – you
don't have enough storage space for all of them!) the game folders and
files from my 32 meg partitions onto your 30 meg partitions. Then use
ADTPro to copy the contents over to your IIGS hard drive. Don't forget
to copy over the icon files you want too.

The only other thing that I can recommend is...get a CFFA, MicroDrive
or Focus. Seriously. It's SO much easier to store things on a real IIGS
this way.

[Tempest]

I might have a bigger HD that should work somewhere around here. Is there a limit on the size of the HD I can put in or how big the partitions can be?

[D Finnigan]

The largest hard drives that I have read about being used in a IIgs system
were in the single-digit gigabyte range.

As for the limitations on partition size, that is largely a function of
whichever file system you choose to use.

--
]DF$
Apple II Book: http://macgui.com/newa2guide/
Usenet: http://macgui.com/usenet/ <-- get posts by email!
Apple II Web & Blog hosting: http://a2hq.com/

[Chuck Morris]

On Monday, February 11, 2013 5:08:47 PM UTC-6, Tempest wrote:
> I might have a bigger HD that should work somewhere around here. Is there a limit on the size of the HD I can put in or how big the partitions can be?

Partitions that you format as ProDOS are limited to 32 MB, but if you have a bigger HD you can create an HFS partition to make use of any remaining space. I've done that with a 256 MB CF card for use with the original CFFA card, creating four 32 MB ProDOS partitions and one HFS volume. I seem to recall seeing that some software won't necessarily run properly if installed on the HFS volume, but otherwise it's perfectly usable.

[gid...@sasktel.net]

> > I might have a bigger HD that should work somewhere around here. Is there
> > a limit on the size of the HD I can put in or how big the partitions can be?

> The largest hard drives that I have read about being used in a IIgs system were in the single-digit gigabyte range.

I believe the HFS FST only supports up to 2 Gb. Another possible solution is to pick up a SCSI cd-rom. A cd-rom from an older Mac computer should be compatible.

Cider Press can read and write to an HFS.iso image. You can download the cd image here, tranfer the files to the image and burn a cd on your PC for use on your IIGS.

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Services/PDA/HFS.iso.zip

Rob

[Bill Garber]

"David Schmidt" <schm...@my-deja.com> wrote in message

news:kfbf6g$o5e$1...@dont-email.me...

Thanks David. I will need to hook up the serial port and have some
experimentation with that. Perhaps it's the increased speed under the
GSOS environment. Have you tried it running at normal speed?

Bill Garber
http://www.sepa-electronics.com

[osgeld]

I have a obnoxiously loud 2 gig SCSI western digital drive I would love to dump on a sucker, er graciously donate to a fellow enthusiast, though I think its 68 pin so one would have to get a cheap adapter

[BLuRry]

It should be possible, but it might be necessary to disable interrupts in the driver. This is an area I'm going to explore sooner or later, as I don't have a disk drive hooked up to my //gs and I would like to be able to just boot into Prodos directly without a disk. (See other post about stuff that does things...)

-B

[Tempest]

On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 12:18:06 AM UTC-5, osgeld wrote:
> I have a obnoxiously loud 2 gig SCSI western digital drive I would love to dump on a sucker, er graciously donate to a fellow enthusiast, though I think its 68 pin so one would have to get a cheap adapter

That might be a bit of overkill considering all the IIgs games ever made would probably fit on a 250 Meg hard drive or so. I'm going to look through my box of junk tonight, but I swear I have a 500 Meg drive that I pulled out of a compact Mac that I can use.

[Tempest]

Where are the IIgs hard drive images located on the Gaming Fairway? I was thinking that rather than putting a new hard drive in my IIgs and reinstalling everything, I could look at the hard drive images in an emulator and see which games are on them and what the folder structure looks like so I duplicate it on my IIgs.

[Chuck Morris]

On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 5:28:35 PM UTC-6, Tempest wrote:
> Where are the IIgs hard drive images located on the Gaming Fairway? I was thinking that rather than putting a new hard drive in my IIgs and reinstalling everything, I could look at the hard drive images in an emulator and see which games are on them and what the folder structure looks like so I duplicate it on my IIgs.

Just go to http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/ and you'll find the images at the bottom of the page.

[Tempest]

Ok found them. What emulator can I use to open them on a Windows 7 machine? The KEGS32 emulator that's linked on the site doesn't seem to have an option for opening hard drive files (just disk files).

[Chuck Morris]

I usually use a stand-alone version of the ActiveGS emulator for IIGS emulation on my Windows 7 laptop. A right-click after starting the app brings up the configuration screen, and you can mount the images there and reboot. You should be able to download the app from http://activegs.freetoolsassociation.com/

[Tempest]

So which slot/drive do I mount the hard drive images to? I keep getting an Unable to Load PRODOS message.

[Chuck Morris]

Most of the images are non-bootable, so you'll need to mount one that is in slot 7, drive 1. You can add others in other drives in slot 7, but I wouldn't mount more than 4 total. Use the System 6.0.1 image as your boot partition. Slot 6 should be used with images of 5.25" disks and slot 5 is for images of 3.5" disks.

[Tempest]

On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 7:41:15 PM UTC-5, Chuck Morris wrote:
> Most of the images are non-bootable, so you'll need to mount one that is in slot 7, drive 1. You can add others in other drives in slot 7, but I wouldn't mount more than 4 total. Use the System 6.0.1 image as your boot partition. Slot 6 should be used with images of 5.25" disks and slot 5 is for images of 3.5" disks.

Got it working. Now to look through it and figure out how to replicate it on my IIgs. This should be kind of fun.

[Tempest]

Ok now this is interesting. When I tried Ancient Glory (I had the same directory structure as it turns out) it did the same thing my IIgs did. It searched the disk drives for awhile but then it started. I never waited to see if it would eventually start, so maybe this is normal behavior for the game? I wonder if there are other games like that?

[Tempest]

A thought just occurred to me. If I were to open up these hard drive images in an emulator and get them down to under 30 megs each by removing a few of the games I don't need, could I then use ADTPro to move them over to my 30 meg partitions on my real IIgs or will I still have problems?

[David Schmidt]

On 2/13/2013 10:29 AM, Tempest wrote:
> If I were to open up these hard drive images in an emulator and get them down to under 30 megs each by removing a few of the games I don't need, could I then use ADTPro to move them over to my 30 meg partitions on my real IIgs or will I still have problems?

You can't guarantee that the games you removed were from the last 2MB,
so you will need to "compress" the disk as well. The way I'd do that is
to create a new 30MB image that matches the block count of my
destination drive with CiderPress. Then open both the 32 and 30 meg
images with CiderPress (two windows open at the same time), Ctrl-A
Ctrl-C (highlight all, copy) from 32MB, Ctrl-V (paste) to 30MB. That
would ensure both that the results fit, and that it will all be inside
the threshold of what your drive will be able to see once you transfer
it back to the real thing.

[Tempest]

Good point. If I can't get my other hard drive working then I'll try this method.

[Alex Lee]

I don't know why Ancient Glory would be behaving that way. I don't
think the game ever came with copy protection. I just loaded it from my
'Action' games 32 meg ProDOS image and it loaded fine (via emulation
with Sweet 16).

[Tempest]

I've noticed a few games seem to search the drives for a disk but eventually give up and load. Even in the emulation Ancient Glory searched the drives but it eventually did load.

[Tempest]

I finally got around to trying this and I've found that only the first two partitions of my hard drive show up. I can get around this by copying the hdv image to the first partition and then moving it to another inside GS/OS, but that's kind of clumsy. Is there a way to make the rest of the partitions show up or is it going to be limited to the first two?

[Tempest]

I'm running into a little problem here. It would appear that whenever I boot now and it tries to read the partition I moved the hdv image to System 6 crashes:

00/0001: 00 02 BRK 02
A=001D X=1902 Y=0002 S=BFCE D=BD00 P=00 B=02 K=00 M=00 Q=B6 L=0 m=0 x=0 e=0

Any ideas? I've tried it twice now and no dice.

[Tempest]

Ok this is a bit weird now. If I use the System 6 boot disk and look at the drives with launcher, everything seems to be there and is just fine. Heck I was even able to launch a game from the partition I had copied over. Also, the more I look at it it appears to crash after displaying the 3rd partition but before the 4th. Any idea as to what this could be? At this point I'm starting to think I'm better off starting over. :)

[gid...@sasktel.net]

On Saturday, February 16, 2013 1:00:59 PM UTC-6, Tempest wrote:
> Ok this is a bit weird now. If I use the System 6 boot disk and look at the drives with launcher, everything seems to be there and is just fine. Heck I was even able to launch a game from the partition I had copied over. Also, the more I look at it it appears to crash after displaying the 3rd partition but before the 4th. Any idea as to what this could be? At this point I'm starting to think I'm better off starting over. :)

A couple of things you might try, is, boot into Pdos8 and check if there is an icons folder on the third volume. Rename it to anything other than icons. And look for a couple of normally hidden files. "Finder.data and Finder.root". They will show up under Pdos8. Delete them both or rename them if you want to try them again later to isolate which was causing the problem.

If need be, you could also try a block editor, to see if block #2 on the third volume got corrupted.

Rob

[Tempest]

I decided to put the other drive in as this one has been making some weird sounds. We'll see if this happens with the new one.

[Tempest]

On Saturday, February 16, 2013 3:19:41 PM UTC-5, gid...@sasktel.net wrote:

Looks like it wasn't the hard drive, it's doing the exact same thing with the new one. How do I get to a the third volume on the hard drive in ProDOS 8?

[David Schmidt]

On 2/16/2013 3:46 PM, Tempest wrote:
> Looks like it wasn't the hard drive, it's doing the exact same thing with the new one. How do I get to a the third volume on the hard drive in ProDOS 8?

It matters which version of ProDOS 8 you're using...

[Michael J. Mahon]

Absolutely. Try version 2.0.3.

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon

[Tempest]

What about the one that's built into the IIgs when you push 8?

[Tempest]

There's something wrong with using ADTPro to copy the .hdv files over onto my partitions. Each time I try to copy one over System 6 crashes when it looks at my fourth partition. Oddly I think the partition with the .hdv info I copied over is fine as I can look at it in prodos and with the launch utility. What on earth could it be? Why the fourth partition? There's nothing on any other partition other than the first (system) and the second (the .hdv full of games).

[Charlie]

On 2/16/2013 8:54 PM, Tempest wrote:
> There's something wrong with using ADTPro to copy the .hdv files over onto my partitions. Each time I try to copy one over System 6 crashes when it looks at my fourth partition. Oddly I think the partition with the .hdv info I copied over is fine as I can look at it in prodos and with the launch utility. What on earth could it be? Why the fourth partition? There's nothing on any other partition other than the first (system) and the second (the .hdv full of games).

This is a shot in the dark but are you aware that a .hdv image is
variable in size and may be smaller than the volume directory header
indicates it is? The .hdv image type was created to conserve space on a
disk. It increases in size as files are added to it. So if you create
say a 32MB image and only put 20MB of data on it the image will be ~20MB
in size but the header will say its 32MB. Some programs may not handle
this properly. You can create a .hdv image by renaming a .po image
extension to .hdv and then the header and size will match.

Charlie

[Tempest]

Ok this is getting downright crazy. I tried making only two partitions on my hard drive (one for the OS and one for the hard drive image I'm copying over) and it worked! System 6.0.1 boots up and there's a nice little partition full of action games for me to play with.

So now the question is: Why does it crash when I transfer this image and have more than three partitions? This just doesn't make any sense.

I wish I could add partitions without having destroy my other ones so I could test adding partitions one by one, but alas that doesn't seem to be possible.

[Tempest]

Ok, it looks like the answer is: Seven partitions is one too many. Once I reduced the number to six everything worked. Very strange, but I'll take it.

Now about my other question: Why does ADTPro only see my first two partitions and is there any way to fix that?

[Riccardo]

> Now about my other question: Why does ADTPro only see my first two partitions and is there any way to fix that?

If Prodos 8 v2.0.3 can't see it then ADTPro also. I think.

[David Schmidt]

On 2/17/2013 10:26 AM, Tempest wrote:
> Ok, it looks like the answer is: Seven partitions is one too many. Once I reduced the number to six everything worked. Very strange, but I'll take it.
>
> Now about my other question: Why does ADTPro only see my first two partitions and is there any way to fix that?

ADTPro will only "see" what 1) ProDOS reveals to it, and 2) a partition
that has media in it (formatted for hard drives, unformatted or
formatted for floppy drives).

You may not be seeing all of your partitions if you are booting from the
ADTPro distribution disk because it contains ProDOS v1.9, the one that
is/was freely available for download from Apple. In that environment,
some disks may not be visible to it.

You may not be seeing all of your partitions if you are booting with '8'
from GSOS if the hard drive partition hasn't been formatted yet. I'm
not sure if there is a chicken+egg situation there or not; but GSOS
should be able to detect and prepare the hard drive partitions the first
time for you even if ADTPro can't.

[Tempest]

Are there any issues using ADTPro from GS/OS? I thought that was a no-no.

[David Schmidt]

On 2/17/2013 2:30 PM, Tempest wrote:
> Are there any issues using ADTPro from GS/OS? I thought that was a no-no.

You don't want to shell out to it from the GUI, no. But starting a
typical GSOS machine while hitting the 8 key will start up in ProDOS 8
mode, bypassing all of the other GSOS gorp.

[Tempest]

That's what I'm doing, but I'm still only seeing the first two partitions (along with the 5.25 and 3.5 drives)

[David Schmidt]

Ok. Are the other two partitions formatted?

[Tempest]

Yes, they're all formatted and initialized.

[David Schmidt]

Ok. Just this once, try shelling out to ADTPro from the GUI. Don't
expect the comms to work very well, but just do a 'V' and see if the
volumes show up that way.