I believe there were several alternatives to Apple's DOS 3.3 back in the day, resulting in faster file-loading, more free space and other features. But after all these years away from the Apple II memory (mine that is) is lacking on the subject, so a few questions:
I have some disks with a track-display (it pops up in the lower right hand corner when booting with such a disk) and displays "HYPER DOS" when doing a CATALOG. However, I'm not able to format (INIT HELLO) a blank disk after having booted from one of those. I simply get an "I/O ERROR".
So I found a disk image named Hyper-Dos.dsk which contains no files at all, but when booted displays the tracks as described above and allows me to INIT HELLO a blank disk.
Then there's a different disk image named 026b_Hyper_Dos_2.dsk which looks like something completely different. Are these two versions of the same thing?
Which DOS alternative should I use to gain more free disk space? Apart from Hyper DOS I think there was Pronto DOS, but I'm not sure what it's differences were.
Are there any other DOS alternatives worth mentioning? I know there's Apple's own ProDOS, but I never did understand all that, so it was all just standard, old fashioned DOS for me ;-)
I've seen many variations on DOS 3.3. 3rd_party_dos: Mostly for speed and compatability with DOS 3.3.
Some variations are stripped down to increase disk space. I used to manually free up space on regular old DOS 3.3 disks, by freeing up some sectors on track 2 or make a non-boot disk without DOS, and formatting the 36th track, but I don't recommend doing this.
There are other utilities like Beautiful Boot, and https://github.com/datajerk/c2d