Hi All,
Whilst I have used Apple computers since the 80's, I have never personally owned one. I always found the IIGS an interesting best and managed to finally get myself one a little while ago and I have generally been enjoying the journey.
One of the first things I got for it was a Booti. It worked great for the Action Replay images but when ever I tried IIGS specific images I kept getting errors at boot up, 'Sorry, system error $0028 ocurred while loading the FST files'. I also tried building a .po in an emulator and copying it to the Booti and got the same error. In the end I was finally able to get GSOS6 installed by booting a install .po and install it to a blank .po I created with cidepress. I did kind of get paranoid so I did a bunch of memory/system tests etc but they reported the system was fine, I also ended up purchasing a Dan ][ just in case during this period
Things were going great and I was slowly building up my HD images with the apps/games etc I wanted to play with then I started to get the same error again. No matter what I did, I couldn;t fix it this time. I ended up copying the image from my USB to an SDCard and tried it on the Dan ][ and the exactr same image booted fine. WIth the Dan ][ I have not seen any of these errors again but I would love to try and work out what might be going wrong with the Booti and have it usable again since having a USB cable out the back of the IIGS makes life a lot easier than playing with the internal sdcards.
The Booti is one of my least favourite peripherals. My advie is to ditch it.
I've had numerous issues with several of them and now I won't touch or recommend them to anyone. They're not reliable, especially not the earlier ones. Apparently the current production examples have new firmware, but the design is still flakey in my opinion.
The best solution for the IIGS if you want to run GSOS is a MicroDrive/Turbo.
It's not a disk image handler, it's a hard disk emulator that uses a CF card to store its data via an IDE interface on the card. So you need to treat it as a hard drive.
It's way faster than the Booti, and with DMA memory access it is the fastest storage solution for the IIGS.
I use a Floppy Emu to manipulate disk images and to get data into and out of the MicroDrive. That, and an Uthernet II network card that lets me access local SMB and AFP servers on modern machines on my local network.
Sounds like it isn't a good option for the IIgs.
But to be fair, I've had one in my //e for years now and it's been great there...
I did update the firmware recently, but as I understand it the only benefit to the new firmware is better handling of longer filenames.
With all the Replay and Dark and such images out there, it works great for that.
And Nox Archaist... ;-)
Thanks for the feedback with your experiences.
I have since stuck with the Dan ][ with the network addition and using that to copy .po's to the card as well as currently looking around for future expansion options atm.