Announcing Apple IIgs System Software 6.0.4

[Anonymous]

Happy II New Year!
Apple IIgs System 6.0.4 has been released.
http://a2central.com/7396/the-source-is-strong-with-this-one-system-6-0-4/

[mver...@libero.it]

I have to admit my ignorance of everything that has more than 8 bits, but I am curious.

Can you explain what it means:

"When JM Gothic is the System Font, the Window Manager uses JM Gothic instead of the hard-coded Shaston 8."

How do you set/change the System Font?
Where you can found this JM Gothic?

Thank you.

Marco

[Alex Lee]

Good question!

I know that JM Gothic is the font that supports Japanese language for
System 6, but there's only one third party system extension I can think
of that allows you to replace the built-in Shaston font. AFAIK the
Japanese language support thing hasn't been released publically.

- Alex

[Andrew Roughan]

<mver...@libero.it> wrote:
> How do you set/change the System Font?

To quote Juiced.GS V21 I1 (where Ian Johnson covers Japanese
internationalization of the Apple IIgs System Software):

"Setting the system font to JM Gothic requires SysFontNDA"

> Where you can find this JM Gothic?
This is part of the Japanese Manager. I have not been able to find this
today. I have notified Ian of your interest and I hope he will contribute a
location for where to find this.

Regards
Andrew

[mver...@libero.it]

Now it is clearer, thanks to all of you. Like I said it was a curiosity, it is not my intention to have the Japanese language!

Marco

[Antoine Vignau]

Font & Code for Japanese support is @ https://github.com/ushicow/JapaneseManager/releases

Antoine

[gerrys...@mac.com]

Hi Everyone, I just installed 6.0.4 on both my IIGSes and, so far, they work great. I installed from the Live.Install.po after booting from it using the CFFA3000. Very straight forward. Initial observation was a slightly faster bootup.

Be sure to back up your boot drive before updating just in case.

Gerry

[yeslad...@gmail.com]

I'm running into a problem with GS/OS 6.0.4. Both my 01 and 03 machines display the same symptoms but slightly differently. First, some background. I use large HFS volumes to hold copies of my CDs, like the OPUS II disk, A2-ROMulan Volume 1, Friends for Life, and Time in a Bottle Discs 1 and 2 They were ripped using Cider Press. The HFS images are 1.5 or 2 GBs in size. My CFFA3000s make it easy to load these images as needed.

With 6.0.3, I could open and close these volumes anytime and as many times as I wanted with no issues. With 6.0.4 when I open and close these volumes the OS starts losing track of these volumes and reports damaged or missing drives after about 5 or 6 openings and closings. A reboot resets the issue but is repeatable. The 03 machine takes about 8 tries before it starts having problems and is less invasive than 01 machine.

Here are the specs on my two Apple IIGSes. They are both the same except for the ROM version.
Slot 1 - Uthernet card
Slot 2 - Apple High Speed SCSI card with AppleCD 300.
Slot 3 - TWGS running at 17 MHz.
Slot 4 - empty
Slot 5 - Apple Superdrive I/F card with two 3.5" Superdrives attached. Slot presently set to your card to have the RAM5 disk available to ProDOS 8 (5,2). There is also a 3.5 disk (5,1) and two 5 1/4 drives attached to the floppy port.
Slot 6 - empty and set to your card. I only use 5 1/4 drives when needed.
Slot 7 - CFFA 3000. I have a 32 GB CF and a 64 GB Thumbdrive for image storage.
Memory Slot - 8 MB memory card.

For those of you who are concerned about overloading the power supply, I replaced the 01 PS with a medical grade 160W PS. The 03 PS has shown no problems with its power supply but I have a spare 160W PS ready when it fails. I have a IIGS System Saver on both which keeps them very cool. I have replaced the standard CRT monitor with a flat-screen 16x9 LCD display. I use a Nishida Radio analog RGB to Y, R-Y, B-Y adapter to drive the monitor's component input.

There is a lot more troubleshooting that needs to be done. I presently have six HFS volumes and four ProDOS volumes on the desktop. Good thing I have copies of my 6.0.3 installation as I can easily roll back.

I'll poke at this some more so if you have any further questions, I'll let you know.

Thanks,
Gerry

[Antoine Vignau]

Did you have the issue with 6.0.1/6.0.2? That may help locate the issue,
av

[Andrew Roughan]

<yeslad...@gmail.com> wrote:
> With 6.0.3, I could open and close these volumes anytime and as many
> times as I wanted with no issues. With 6.0.4 when I open and close these
> volumes the OS starts losing track of these volumes and reports damaged
> or missing drives after about 5 or 6 openings and closings.

> Thanks,
> Gerry

> On Sunday, January 8, 2017 at 1:50:16 PM UTC-8, gerrys...@mac.com wrote:
>> Hi Everyone, I just installed 6.0.4 on both my IIGSes and, so far, they work great.
>>

>> Gerry

Same Gerry?

What device are you booting 6.0.4 from when you have the issues?
Was that a clean install of 6.0.4 or an upgrade of a previous version?
Is 6.0.3 running from the same device when you don't have the issues?

Regards
Andrew

[Andrew Roughan]

<yeslad...@gmail.com> wrote:
> With 6.0.3, I could open and close these volumes anytime and as many
> times as I wanted with no issues.

I missed the obvious question. How are you opening and closing these
'volumes'?

If I understand you correctly you have made HFS image that contains sub
directory containing the content of the CD. Is that correct? Are you just
opening and closing the folder on the HFS partition repeatedly? Is the HFS
partition write protected? If not, please make it read only and try again.

Regards
Andrew

[yeslad...@gmail.com]

Thank you Antoine and Andrew for your quick responses. I'm not sure what's going on but GS/OS 6.0.4 is running much better now. But first I'll answer your questions.

Antione, my systems ran fine under 6.0.1 and 6.0.3. I never installed 6.0.2.
Andrew, I booting both systems from a 32 MB 2MG image I call System.HD from CF storage on the CFFA3000. My normal configuration is that the boot drive is on the CF and all other images are on the Thumbdrive. That makes it easy to add or change images on either machine. Both boot images are upgrades from 6.0.3 using the Live.Install.po included with 6.0.4 distribution image. I did some testing and both systems run fine from my 6.0.3 System.HD image. When I say opening and closing these volumes, I'm using the finder to open the drive images mounted on the desktop and opening and closing subdirectories or folders in their respective windows.

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time troubleshooting this issue and I have more details and results. I noticed that when the 01 machine started losing access to the drives, the access LED on the Thumbdrive would blink for a long, long time and then stop with the OS reporting a damaged drive or asked to insert that volume. So I thought I'm going to move all the Thumbdrive images over to the internal CF. That was a lot of work as you know I had to tear open the machines, mount the CF and ThumbDrive drives in my Mac Pro and move gigabytes of data since each HFS image is 1.5 and 2 GBs in size and I have at least a dozen of them. Since I had the IIGSes torn open, I also backed up the storage which took time as well. I also scanned the storage under Win7 to confirm that the FAT32 formatting was good. It was.

I finished last night and recounted all the images on the CFFA3000 using only the CF. Both systems started working fine. I could open all the HFS partitions using the finder without any failures. But I still had a weird quirk with the 01 machine. On boot up, it kept reporting duplicate drives and wanted to relabel or eject them. What? That points to the CFFA3000 config file (CFFA.CFG).

Sure enough when I looked at the images assigned in the CFFA's smartport list, they were duplicated but I had removed all the assignments before adding new ones. I cleaned them out and that resolved that problem. For the 03 machine, it consistently reported one of the HFS volumes to be corrupted. I replaced that image from a backup and fixed that issue.

So I suspect that the CFFA.CFG files got corrupted even though that's never happened before to me and some images got corrupted which has never happened before either. So 6.0.4 appears to be working well on both machines. I reassigned two of the HFS images from the Thumbdrive to see if there were any more problems but, so far, no problems. I'll work on it when I have time.

To summarize, it appears to be a problem with the CFFA3000, either a corrupted CFG file and some damaged HFS images. My CFFA3000 firmware is 3.1 and I've noticed that on Dreher's website he as released 3.1.1. Maybe I should upgrade. I do have a 3rd CFFA3000 that's in my Platinum IIe but I have that in storage. I'll pull it if I have any further issues with either of these cards.

Thank you for taking the time to read this too long post. If there are any further questions, please let me know.

Gerry

[Antoine Vignau]

That is a weird problem! Is the cffa.cfg the cause or the consequence of the problem?!? Will we ever know?

Antoine

[Andrew Roughan]

gerrys...@mac.com <yeslad...@gmail.com> wrote:
> each HFS image is 1.5 and 2 GBs in size and I have at least a dozen of them.

> For the 03 machine, it consistently reported one of the HFS volumes to be corrupted.

> So I suspect that ... some images got corrupted

As hinted at in the Press Release, writing HFS from the IIgs is apparently
not a good thing to do, especially with large volumes.
I wanted to tell you how to write protect them, but haven't confirmed how
it can be done yet. Perhaps someone else here knows.

When the image is write protected Finder.data will not be written which
will make navigation not as pleasant, but this can be overcome with my
Finder Extra Virtual Data that does a similar job but writes the info to
the system folder instead.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~kalandi/apple/virtual data.html

Regards
Andrew

[Andrew Roughan]

Andrew Roughan <andrew....@writeme.com> wrote:
> I wanted to tell you how to write protect them, but haven't confirmed how
> it can be done yet. Perhaps someone else here knows.

Lock the file on the USB/CF using a Mac or PC

> Regards
> Andrew

[yeslad...@gmail.com]

Yes, Antoine it is a weird problem.

Andrew, I thought there was a patch that fixed the HFS FST corruption issue in 6.0.1 that's been applied to subsequent versions of GS/OS. I rarely write to HFS partitions on the IIGS but when I do I haven't had any issues. I'll keep an eye out for any further problems. Does the IIGS Finder's verify command in the disk menu work properly for HFS partitions? At over 3 million blocks, checking is an all night affair. Can Cider Press also verify HFS partitions? It would be much faster. I wish there was an OS X version of Cider Press. I keep having to hop back into Win7 under VMware Fusion to use Cider Press.

Gerry

[D Finnigan]

yesladydroyal wrote:
> Andrew, I thought there was a patch that fixed the HFS FST corruption
> issue
> in 6.0.1 that's been applied to subsequent versions of GS/OS.

You're probably referring to this:
http://macgui.com/downloads/?file_id=11654

HFS Patcher by Procyon Enterprises Inc.

My favorite quote from this: "I simulated all 8 billion cases on a Power Mac
(4 billion with the INC, 4 billion with the NOP), and the NOP is correct."

--
]DF$
The Marina IP stack for Apple II--
http://marina.a2hq.com/

[alel...@gmail.com]

I have never come across the SysFont NDA – it's not in my rigorously collected group of system extensions (http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/system-extensions-or-create-your-killer-gs-os-environment/) and the only archive of it I can find (SysFont.NDA.SHK here: https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ground.icaen.uiowa.edu/Collections/1WSW/New_KanjiWARES/) seems to be corrupt. Does anyone have this NDA?

Alex

[Leon Sargent]

Following up on HFS.Patch. Yeah i know... a bit late.

Was the patch implemented in later community update releases?

I was going to run that patch. If it has already been patched, running GS/OS 6.0.4, then I am just seeking clarification.

Thank you.

Leon

[fatdog projects]

Yes Leon, 6.0.4 is up to date with HFS bug fixes. You do not need to run the patch.

[Robert Bullock]

Greetz!

Is it OK to patch my A2SERVER netboot to 6.0.4 with the install disks I presume? It only installs 6.0.4.

Also had an idea: USB to Serial to IIgs and plug it right into a Pi for external storage via A2SERVER. The code it seems would already be out there to do something similar already. Just need to make the Pi's serial port a network interface. Haven't dug much yet.

[Todd Holcomb]

Has anyone else noticed that Shrinkit for the IIgs freezes when you try to launch it under System 6.0.4? It works fine under 6.0.3. This happens both in emulation with Sweet16 and on my rom1 IIgs. The HD image I'm using is an upgrade and not a "clean install".

[Antoine Vignau]

Does it happen when you shift-boot?

[Todd Holcomb]

On Sunday, September 1, 2019 at 3:59:32 PM UTC-5, Antoine Vignau wrote:
> Does it happen when you shift-boot?

No it doesn't, and I narrowed it down to NTPPlayer in my FinderExtras folder. GS Shrinkit works like a charm now!

[Antoine Vignau]

NTP Player is beta software and you have the first version that has a nasty bug. You can delete it.

I'll finish it some day,
Antoine

[Anthony Adverse]

Here is a roundtuit for you. ;)

[Antoine Vignau]

Does "roundtuit" mean "circuit"?!? I do not understand the sentence, sorry,
av

[Steve Nickolas]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2019, Antoine Vignau wrote:

> Does "roundtuit" mean "circuit"?!? I do not understand the sentence, sorry,
> av
>

"I'll get around to it"

-uso.

[Tempest]

On Tuesday, September 3, 2019 at 9:34:44 AM UTC-4, Antoine Vignau wrote:
> Does "roundtuit" mean "circuit"?!? I do not understand the sentence, sorry,
> av

Old old joke. They used to make little round coins that had TUIT on it so you would "get a round 'TUIT' (to it)". It's corny and doesn't translate well.

[Antoine Vignau]

Thaaannkk yyoouu,
av

[David Schmidt]

Idioms never do. I've learned to avoid them with international
audiences. They can be nice little shortcuts with lots of meaning
within a particular culture, but not for those that learned the language
in a school.

[Anthony Adverse]

On Tuesday, September 3, 2019 at 11:34:44 PM UTC+10, Antoine Vignau wrote:
> Does "roundtuit" mean "circuit"?!? I do not understand the sentence, sorry,
> av

Sorry, in english its easy. Usually "you'll do it when you get around to it", so if you give someone a "roundtuit" its a bit like asking or telling them to get on with it.

A

[Antoine Vignau]

Thank you All, I like learning new words and expressions in English.

Antoine

[Tempest]

On Tuesday, September 3, 2019 at 3:34:04 PM UTC-4, Antoine Vignau wrote:
> Thank you All, I like learning new words and expressions in English.
>
> Antoine

This one is pretty uncommon. I had never heard until I ran into it in a text adventure called Eric the Unready. You had to get someone to fix a soda machine by giving him a TUIT coin. I had to cheat my way past that one as it made no sense to me. I told my parents about it and they busted up laughing and explained the joke to me.

Doing some research I guess it's a 60's thing.

[James Davis]

On Tuesday, September 3, 2019 at 1:13:09 PM UTC-7, Tempest wrote:

> Doing some research I guess it's a 60's thing.

Yes, "Michael, AppleWin Developer," had this at the end of one of his replies in "Apple II emulator for iOS?" at <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.emulators.apple2/DrGXpYl3OVY>:

"(*) /cue Round Tuit -- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/round_tuit"

which explains/defines what it means.

[James Davis]

P.S. In all the years since the 1964 Worlds Fair, I have never heard of it. [I was twelve then.]

[jolten...@gmail.com]

I remember getting one with some snarky saying about it being rare and guarding it well so I found this....

https://rlbos.home.xs4all.nl/shedde/tuits.pdf

[Anthony Adverse]

> https://rlbos.home.xs4all.nl/shedde/tuits.pdf

Noice.....

Weird, I thought it'd be way more common than that... I'm not even "that" old.

A

[Michael 'AppleWin Debugger Dev']

That's the version I remember as well. Those have been around since the the early 80's.