softerm II and hard drives.

[CHRISTOPHER CHUNG]

Does anyone know how to modify Softerm II to work on a hard drive?
I called Softronics technical support and they said it couldn't be done
because DOS 3.3 cannot be run on a hard drive. This sounds very funny
to me. The problem I am having is that I cannot load any of the
configurations once I get softerm to boot. Anything that has to access
the hard drive gives an I/O error. Anyone know why this is happening
or how it can be fixed? Are there any other programs that you have
encountered that do the same thing.

Chris
Acknowledge-To: <ST802414@BROWNVM>

[Seymour]

Chris

It is very difficult/Impossible to put softerm // on a hard disk. I tried
very hard to do it some time ago and found out the following things.

Although Softerm ][ comes on a DOS disk, it replaces DOS 3.3 with its
own custom operating system (that is smaller, faster and that can read
Pascal and CP/M) during its startup process. It is not a DOS 3.3
problem that stifles hard disk users, but the incompatability of this
custom operating system code.

Methods for putting Softerm on hard disk:

A)Boot up Softerm from floppy, load and set things just the way you want
them and then use a 128K copy card like the Wildcard //e to snap a picture
of memory and write it out as a set of binary files. You then move those
files to your hard disk and use the WildCard startup utility to replace
Softerm in the memory locations it started in. Cons: You cannot change
configuration files on the fly and Softerm will not read or write your
hard disk for file transfer or disk utilities.

B) Call Softronics and complain loudly. It is about time they came
out with a new version that was hard disk compatible and supported
ProDOS. A better user interface would also help. Let them know that
when you decided to buy THE MOST EXPENSIVE terminal emulator for the
Apple // bar-none, you expect it to perform accordingly.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Seymour
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