I'm trying to solve a problem here and hoping to get some input.
I have a large number of "hi-res" pictures from back in the BBS days I'm organizing. These are all compressed with the AXE PACKER, that in and of itself is not a problem. It works fine in Applewin. And I can easily put them back into a "BSAVE PIC123,A$4000,L$1FF8" uncompressed format. And it enabled me to put 30 or 40 pictures on a single floppy disk. That was kick-ass back in the day! Wow!
My problem is that a lot of these pics, several hundred, have long Dos 3.3 filenames.
And I want to put them in sequence in a slideshow.
Back in the day I just used my Sider 10 megger drive, and wrote a little basic program that cycled through them. Switching between volumes as the show progressed.
Today I'd like to do the equivalent in Applewin perhaps.
And my questions are:
1- is there a patch or mod or some hack that would let Pro-Dos (on a //e) accept complete DOS 3.3 naming conventions? I.e. 30-character filenames with the oddball characters like and "/" and "]" and "[" and so on and so forth?
2- if the answer to #1 is no, then, is there a way to make a large DOS 3.3 image? 1 or 2 megs in size perhaps? And also have it be recognized in Applewin.
3- most unlikely, emulate the Sider drive.
I would strongly prefer option #2, because part of the filenames are descriptive. And that would let me keep them intact, yet conveniently access any pic any time, easily.
What I don't want to do is re-name all these pics and re-write the menu program so it works in ProDOS..
I only used the 140Kb 5.25" Apple Floppies... Could the DOS.MASTER program assist you in this matter???
MarkO is right, DOS.MASTER is your only hope. You would access different virtual DOS disks via different volume numbers.
I believe it will! From the looks of it straight away, it seems to provide the ability to access 255 1600-sector DOS 3.3 volumes from within ProDOS. And that far exceeds my Sider drive, but the volume SIZES are right.
I bet this will work for doing exactly what I want. If not it seems close enough that I can easily work right around any issues.
What luck! "Emulating" the Sider drive. OR, rather, building up a similar configuration.
To me, *THIS* is what classic computing is all about. Finding new ways to do things you wanted to years ago, but gave up because of frustration or simple lack of knowledge and an aversion to tearing into details sometimes
Today, and most important to me, we have the power of a massive and incredibly fast filing system (and incredible support utilities) in the form of a modern PC (or MAC). Things we could only dream about in fits of delirium back in the day.