David Schmidt announced via comp.sys.apple2 that ADTPro is now running natively on the Apple /// sans a few glitches he is requesting help with. Check out David’s post (attached) and help out if you can.

David deserves a lot of kudos for making ADTPro easy to use, and especially for bringing people (new and old) into the Apple II community. I can’t tell you how many e-mails we’ve received at A2Central, from people who are looking for a boot disk. They’ve either lost their diskettes in a move, or the disks have gone bad. Sometimes it’s a curious hacker picking up an Apple II at a garage sale. ADTPro makes creating a needed boot disk hassle free.


The good news: ADTPro is now running natively on the Apple /// under SOS. It’ll read and write whatever SOS device you are running. You can download a .zip file the contains a plain old .dsk containing a SOS bootable image that can handle your floppy drives and a Profile. I’ve also included a .dsk image that has a driver for Rich Dreher’s CFFA card in slot 1 on the ///. So you can transfer your CFFA images back and forth now too. It supports the built-in RS-232 port on the back of the /// (see bug 1 below), as well as a Super Serial card in any of the 4 slots. Uthernet support is on the agenda.

http://adtpro.sourceforge.net – look for ADTSOS-1.0.6.zip on the download page.

The bad news: there’s a couple of bugs left that I can’t get a handle on, and could use the world’s help with.

Bug 1: the built-in ACIA (on the /// that I have) seems to double-up on characters it sends when initiating a transmission most of the time. So, normally, I would send a string like “ZFILE.DSK” to query
the existence of “FILE.DSK”. It arrives as “ZZFILE.DSK” at the host 3/4 of the time. NO idea why. If I fake it out by copying FILE.DSK to ZFILE.DSK, then the query works… but then the string that is sent
to get the file is: “GFILE.DSK”; that arrives as “GGFILE.DSK” half the time. If I also fake that out by copying FILE.DSK to GFILE.DSK, everything works fine! Note, this problem does not occur with the Super Serial card.

Bug 2: after the first transfer (to or from), the .CONSOLE driver stops echoing characters you type. So, when you are specifying what image to transfer the second time, you have to type blind. I have
tried everything I can, down to closing and re-opening the console driver. I can’t seem to make it echo typed characters any more. I’ve tried it under SOS 1.1 and 1.3. No difference.

Other than that, it works great. ? Well, I don’t have formatting support wired up yet, and probably won’t in the near future. Formatting is sufficiently device-specific that I might leave that to the utility disks to do for me.