The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!!

[Running Bear]

Good morning. It's 42° with 80% humidity and light rain. The high will be 55° and feel like 58°.
with

This morning I did some work with the SDFloppy ][. I now have sixteen 5.25" diskettes copied to an SD card starting with the DOS 3.3 System Master. I then used the System Master to initialize directories 1 thru F so they now have the DOS image. The computer can be cold booted and start with DOS 3.3 from any directory on the card with the exception of 7 and A. Directory 7 is CP/m and will start and run under the Z80 coprocessor. Directory A is ProDOS and will start and run in that language under the G65SC02 processor on my //e or under the 6502 processor on either of my older IIe's. I no longer have to have a system diskette in one of the disk drives. The system will boot and run normally from the 0 (zero) directory of the SDFloppy ][. This morning I played an entire game of Starfleet1 solely from the SDFloppy ][ with only a blank data diskette in the drive at slot 6, drive 1. If I had this thing connected to slot 6 I wouldn't even need that! It felt good not having to change diskettes every time the program needed something from the other diskette. All I had to do was press a button to change directories. Something else that's nice is that I can copy directly from the SD card to a floppy diskette and the copy will have all the DOS support of the original and run just like the original. From what I can gather from the SD card that was supplied with the unit the programming that runs it was likely done on a Bulgarian Pravetz computer, their version of an Apple IIc clone. Whoever designed the SDFloppy unit is either a genius or one of the luckiest sad sack programmers around. I set up the SD card in MS-DOS then put it in the SDFloppy unit and my ancient Apple computer can write to and read from the card like it's an Apple hard drive. That's impressive! No, that's brilliant! That trumps my claim to fame of getting an Apple computer to communicate back to back and share programs without a modem with a Panasonic IBM XT clone back in 1985.

One of these days I'll get back home and I'll be able to talk about model railroad projects again. I can't do any of that down here without getting griped at about it. The sooner I can get back home the better.